Our spring semester starts next week after being off since Dec. 14. Although the holidays were nice, my break was actually very busy with GRA projects, an outside research project I'm doing with UMB and the VA hospital, working on dissertation research, helping my sister w/ her kids after she had some surgeries, putting the finishing touches on a paper to submit for publication, and revising a poster I made that I'll be presenting this week at the SSWR conference in Washington D.C. SSWR stands for Society for Social Work Research and it's "the" social work research conference. Every four years or so it comes back to Washington D.C. Last year it was in San Francisco and I think next year it'll be in Miami. It's a very competitve process to have a poster or presentation accepted for SSWR, so even though it's been stressful and hectic, I didn't want to miss this opportunity. The poster that I'll be presenting and the article I'm submitting for publication are actually the outcome of a project I did for my Statistics II class. It was a lot of work at the time, but worth it given the positive outcomes.

This semester I'm taking Research Practicum II, an independent study where I'll learn some advanced statistics, and some dissertation credits. I'm planning to depend my dissertation proposal in May (keeping my fingers crossed!) but I have a lot to do before then.

Please feel free to leave me a comment or question. :)