It has been almost a year since I completed the doctorate. And I have a confession to make…I submitted the wrong draft to the ProQuest Dissertation Publishing. I actually did pay to have the dissertation professionally edited and that copy was the one that went before my committee to pass for my doctoral defense. However, the copy that I submitted for publication was not my edited copy. It was the one that was full of errors. So even worse, I paid more money to have a bound copy printed for myself. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch this fact until this summer when I reread part of my paper via the ProQuest database. Cause, yes, I am the type of geek who googles their name to see what comes up.
In my defense, the week that I was finalizing all those submissions was also the first round of my husband’s three…almost four…month battle in the hospital at the beginning of the year (check out the This is Sjogren’s post). I was a little distracted at the time and in the midst of full blown burnout, but it is embarrassing that that is the draft that is officially out in the world. —Note to prospective doctoral students, the ProQuest editors will not check for grammar errors, just that you have the right margins. I did have to resubmit to fix bad margins, so maybe that is when I swapped the submission for the bad draft.
One day, I will return to the world of factors that influence decision making when it comes to creativity and innovation. I fully plan on turning everything into something more interesting (and typo free!). I have a lot of ideas spinning on what would make for an interesting book from all that work. For now, I have promised my son that I will take a break from projects outside of my regular working hours.
However, if I could turn back time, I would definitely make sure I had the right draft. What would you fix if you could?