venting a little anxiety

I spent an hour and a half on the phone with my advisor yesterday (you'll recall that he's on sabbatical in Santa Barbara, so I can't just go to his office) talking about my thesis. The conversation was in general positive, helpful, and even a bit comforting, but I'm feeling totally overwhelmed by how much work I need to do before the development conference on March 17th. I submitted my paper title and abstract to the conference chairs today; there is some chance that they won't accept my paper for the conference, but based on what I know, that's fairly unlikely (not because I'm fabulous, but rather because they are generally not overwhelmed by potential presenters, and I think they like to have students present). So between now and then I need to pry some additional information out of IMED, which means that I have to give them some kind of summary of our findings, which they've been bugging us for. The problem is that there's so much data and we don't have much in the way of coherent results at the moment, so I'm not entirely sure what to give them. I guess just some descriptive statistics (this percentage of people that we surveyed bought a TV since they got credit, etc), but coming up with that stuff will actually probably be a lot of work, and I'm not entirely sure how to do it either in Excel or Stata (partly because I don't know those programs as well as I should, and partly because it's tricky to do stuff like that with panel data). Anyway, I also have to go back through every survey and add some more variables and make some changes to existing variables. And then I have to run a bunch of econometric estimations and tests that I only sort of understand. And then after that I have to run my regression model in a bunch of different ways, and make neat little graphs to go with everything.

I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining. I'm actually feeling very enthusiastic about my thesis at the moment. I don't mind doing the work, I just wish I felt like I knew what I was doing a little more. But I suppose the point of school is that you don't know what you're doing and then you learn. I keep forgetting about that.

The good news is that I'm staying on top of my regular schoolwork pretty well (which is not, you know, super-difficult when one is only taking two classes, but still), so I can spend some serious time focused on my thesis without too much other stuff hanging over my head. The fact that I am attending five classes total (the two I'm enrolled in, the two I'm auditing, and Undergrad Econometrics, which I'm TAing) is actually in some ways helpful, because I can multitask during the three I'm not being graded on, and I'm on campus a lot, which encourages me to work in the time between classes.

Okay, I need to get to bed. Probably by Thursday or Friday I'll have a chance to post some more Belize pictures and tell ya'll more about the trip.