It's official :)

Today is a big day. A really big day. I just got my letter from the graduate school announcing their acceptance of my dissertation proposal and my elevation to candidacy!

But what on earth does that mean? I'll try to paint a picture here.

I've completed five years of graduate school now. I took two years to get my Masters degree in Art History from the University of Colorado - Boulder. It was a challenging two years, with difficult courses, my first experiences teaching, big fat comprehensive exams, and finally a thesis. I've just now completed the third year of my PhD.

The PhD, naturally, is bigger and scarier than the MA. There are more hoops to jump through in this degree, but with this elevation to candidacy, I'm almost out of hoops! So far in my PhD I have completed my language proficiency exams (two: German and Italian), completed my coursework, taught for two academic years and 2 (soon to be 3) summer sessions. I studied and passed my preliminary exams and finally I wrote my dissertation proposal. I then submitted it to my committee, then the department's faculty, and finally the graduate school. I can now officially bill myself as ABD (all but dissertation) and put "PhD Candidate" in the signature of my emails. I can get faculty jobs at this point (a lot of places hire at ABD). There are only two hoops left at this point: write my dissertation and then defend it. And while this will take some time, the end is in sight!

Please excuse this tooting of my own horn, but it was such a surprise to get this letter today. I was told that I probably wouldn't get it until the beginning of July and so wasn't even expecting it when I opened that letter. I've worked so hard, moved across the country twice, taken out considerable student loans, and crammed a ridiculous amount of information in my head for this. I'm really proud of the work that I've done. I know that I can complete this degree. And I'm really excited for my dissertation.

I plan on doing a post in the near future describing my dissertation, my I thought I'd drop a little hint here. These two pictures show my topic, almost in full:


And now I must forge ahead with this task. I've steadily gotten back into doing research in the last few days and am so excited about my project. It's such a lot of work, researching, analyzing, critiquing, and writing, but it's got a fantastic end result. Here's how the grad school put it in my candidacy letter: "You have selected a research topic, and by the time you graduate, you should be the world's most knowledgeable expert on that topic."

It's a tall order, but I know I can do it. So again, please pardon the self-love in this post but I'm excited. Thrilled. And really grateful to everyone who has helped and supported me along the way.