The “10 pages per week” goal I’ve been setting for myself has generally worked up until this point (save for one week, when I simply had too heavy an assignment for machine learning to work on my dissertation), but it’s going to fall apart very soon.

At page 50, I’ve reported all of the experiments we’ve done so far. I’ve even made up a lot of figures and sprinkled them throughout the paper. I am now idle. It’s bad when you think you can fill another page or two just by writing the acknowledgments early. I simply can’t cram anything more into that dissertation until we do more experiments. However, we can’t do more experiments until the next meeting with the CMU people.

If this continues every week, I am going to slip behind my schedule fast, since I’m working on an entirely different timeline than the rest of my group. While I can push myself as hard as I’d like, it’s unfair to my group to force them to move at a breakneck pace because I want to finish quickly; it’s not like they’re slacking off. Anyway, I don’t want such a disparity to occur, so I need to do something. Perhaps taking on more work myself is a good idea, since what I have thus far for my dissertation isn’t particularly challenging or time-consuming, not to mention that the rest of the group would probably be happy to offload more work on my shoulders. Once I finish machine learning, I’m going to have a lot of time as well, as it will essentially start the winter break that never ends 🙂

I’m wondering if I can do some experiments of my own and put them in the paper. It is supposed to be my own original work, after all, and I do have some good ideas which I’m fairly sure are original, having done a fairly extensive background search before and during writing.

Every conference paper I’m writing now (and there are a lot!) has some relevance as well; I can probably find a way to include all of them in my dissertation as experiments without losing the focus on tensors and medical imaging that I’ve established.

I need to polish some things up and then I’ll send a draft to my advisor. Yes, the first draft I’m sending for review is going to be 50 pages long. Hopefully this won’t end up with me rewriting what I expect to be 1/3 of my dissertation 🙂