Committee members of awesomeness.

For those who have been closely following my dissertation proposal-writing drama-llama, I just have to pause and report that I just finished a nice, encouraging meeting with another committee member. He was great at pointing out the reasons why my current proposal draft is weak AND how I can improve it (in a theoretical sense, not a hand-holding "fix-it" sense). I really did a heck of a job picking my committee--it's a great mix of really smart people.

I guess the lessons for me to learn at the present moment are lessons about mentoring styles--for me at least, it's not a good thing to get vague, generalized feedback ten minutes before I was planning to go home (think Monday). Instead, it's great when someone can clearly identify an overall pattern (i.e. too vague; lacking in certain types of specifics) and ask the right, specific questions in person. I can only aspire to be the latter type of mentor. I mean, I knew full well that this present draft needed work, but reached a saturation point where I couldn't identify the kind of work that it needed, which is when it's useful to get feedback from other people.

Perhaps there's hope after all.