#16 - Submit a Piece of Writing for Publication

Oh, academic research.  You're so useful and important and sometimes engaging and also tedious and time consuming.  This one piece took way longer than anticipated... and I have 5 others in various stages of completion.  While 4 of those should have been simpler to produce in an article format because they're based on my dissertation, which is already written, this article got done first.  Why?  Because DeJuan Benford, my supervisor at San Diego State University, allowed me to set a goal for the year of submitting a piece of writing for publication, turn a work assignment into a full-blown research project, request assistance from one of our student leaders, and work on it at work periodically.

The original assignment was to gather sport club dues information to assist San Diego State's sport club teams in setting their team dues.  At the time, I was just starting to analyze my data for my dissertation, so I realized the value in turning information gathering into formal data collection for academic research.  At that point, I did not realize how stupidly tedious and time consuming data cleaning and formatting can be.  

After I had agreed to do the project, in a meeting with our Sport Club Executive Board, DeJuan asked the five student Sport Club Executive Board members if anyone would like to assist me with the project.  For some reason, Mark Slader volunteered.  Mark is great.  At the time, he was also in school full-time, president of his sport club team, Executive President of sport clubs, and studying for the MCAT.  Then he was signed with the San Diego Growlers, a professional team in the American Ultimate Disc League.  Plus probably some other things.  And the project was all voluntary... as in he wasn't getting paid.  So I hope some form of this research is accepted for publication so he at least gets a line on his resume out of it.

Me & King Mark

Instead of describing all the tedious steps, here's a quick summary:
IRB: me
Survey design: me
Survey testing: Mark & DeJuan
E-mail address collection: Mark & me
Survey distribution: me
Data cleaning: Mark & me
Literature review: me
Data analysis: me
Synthesis: Mark & me
Writing: me
Editing: Mark & me
Article submission: me

I actually find the literature review, data analysis, and writing to be interesting.  Data cleaning, however, is the worst.  It's one of three reasons I could never be a researcher.  (The first reason is that I'd be too lonely and the third is that I don't sit still well.)  I'm so thankful Mark helped with that part because I might not have made it to the end if I had to do all of on my own.

The article focuses on the increasingly costs of higher education, the demonstrated value of highly involved campus programs like sport clubs (particularly for low-income students who are also more likely to be members of populations already underrepresented in higher education), a summary of the findings about the variability of the costs and funding strategies in institutions, and an exploration of relationships between institutional characteristics and costs for participation in sport clubs.  I'm hopeful to further explore this topic because our findings have the potential to be useful to the profession and additional responses and validity would add to that.

So, I've now co-authored and submitted a piece of writing for publication.  I can't wait to do the next one... mostly because the data has already been cleaned and analyzed :)  I do hope to continue to do academic research, to always be working on a project, because it's really gratifying, at times fun, and so important to further the legitimacy of my profession and for informed decision making.  I'm also saying that knowing this article will likely come back with revisions (since it's the first article either of us has submitted), so maybe I'll feel differently after receiving that harsh academic feedback.