Reflection on 100 posts & status of my thesis

Here I am, writing the 100th post for this blog, which I started back in May to get myself cracking on my Harvard Extension School thesis. In the intervening months I noted the Harvard Extended blog had developed some corollary missions related to the nature of my research on Chinese media and history.

Some other highlight posts (in my view) of the 100 made so far include:

* Fighting thesis procrastination

* Thesis blues

* American journalists in foreign countries

* Xinhua finally becoming a "world news agency"?

* Learning about history through movies

* Expert analysis of PRC foreign policy, and the missing ingredient: mass media

* The British Empire in Colour

* Your ridiculous clamour for "human rights" is nothing but a shrill cry!

* Great quotes about journalism in China

* Precis for Porter's Reporting the News from China (warning: long!)

* Patterns of upheaval in modern Chinese history

* A rock and roll past in Taiwan

* ALM thesis writers' meeting/Revisiting Vietnam?

* The myth of the China market becoming reality?

* Published in the South China Morning Post

* Vietnam and Iraq: promoting democracy, and forgetting about it

* Part-time vs. Full-time, Online, and my Harvard whine

* Thesis proposal: Start, write, throw away, rewrite

The above posts run the gamut, but they shouldn't detract from the primary purpose of the Harvard Extended blog: to promote progress on my thesis. And this is where I stand with my thesis as of now:

I have submitted part 2 of my proposal (the key section which outlines the problem, my proposed hypotheses, and my proposed research methodology) to Professor Ostrowski, the Extension School faculty member (and ALM research advisor) who helps history and government concentrators refine their proposals into a thesis idea which other Harvard faculty (the thesis directors) can hopefully help shepherd to completion.

I submitted the proposal to Professor Ostrowski one month ago, and still haven't heard back from him. That's not unusual, proclaims the Harvard Extension School's Guide to the ALM Thesis: during peak periods, research advisors sometimes work on 75 proposals at once, and it takes time for them to review draft proposals. If I don't hear from him within the next week, I'm attending the ALM Thesis Writers' meeting on Nov. 21, which Professor Ostrowski leads, and will ask him how long he expects to take.

In the meantime, I haven't been sitting on my duff. I am preparing another precis on a book edited by David Lampton, Chinese Foreign Policy in the Era of Reform, 1978-2000. I've prepared probably a dozen full-length preces (see example here). on books and dissertations related to China, Chinese history, and Chinese media in the past two years; these will be invaluable when I compose the other parts of the thesis proposal and start work on the actual thesis.