Goals for Winter Break

Korrin B.

December 11, 2010 - 7:30 PM

Although relaxing is one of my top priorities for winter break, I also have two main things that I need to accomplish as well. It will be nice to start winter term knowing that these are well on their way.

The first thing I need to work on is my thesis. By the end of winter break, I am hoping to have solid drafts for four sections of my thesis. I am going to write my introduction, background, literary review, and methodology. I am the most concerned about writing my literary review. The literary review takes a look at the scholarly literature that is already out there about my topic. I have found a lot of good articles so far on homelessness prevention and I'm looking forward to reading them all. I am hoping to find a good way to make my literary review flow with the rest of my paper. My background section shouldn't be that hard to write since I already wrote some of it for my thesis prospectus last spring. Also, I finally got my human subjects approval, so I can begin setting up interviews for my thesis. I think I am going to start by contacting people related to the policy I'm working on at the local level and then work my way up to the federal level. Overall, it will be so exciting to begin to see my thesis really start coming together.

The second thing I will be working on over winter break are my applications for post-graduation opportunities. As I described in a previous post, I am applying for three year-long fellowships: the New York City Urban Fellows Program, the Congressional Hunger Center's Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellows program, and the City Hall Fellows in San Francisco. Each of the applications is quite intensive. Over break, I am hoping to get drafts of my essays for the NYC Urban Fellows and the Congressional Hunger Center done this break, as they are due in January. It is hard sometimes to choose all of the right words and meanwhile stay within the word limit! I am looking forward to getting going on these, as it will take a lot of stress off of me to have them out of the way.

I plan to do a lot of my thesis and application work at cozy coffee shops drinking pots of different teas.