Hello Blogosphere! My name is Bob Ngo. I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California – Santa Barbara. Some of you may already know me from another blog that I maintain (and I use “maintain” in the loosest sense possible) on these here internets. Anyways, as you might guess by the title “PhD Candidate”, I am working on my dissertation on the Sabermetric movement in American Baseball, and I thought it might be a good idea to track the whole process with a blog. I’ve decided to use a blog for a number of reasons.

1. I am a very disorganized person. I take pages of notes on lots of stuff, but I’m too lazy to ever getting around to organizing it. I figure that a blog is a central place where I can at least find stuff when I need to.
2. It’s also a physical manifestation of my progress on the dissertation, that my committee, and more importantly, I can monitor. When I go too many days without posting on my personal blog, I just say, “eff it, no one is paying me.” But if I go too many days here, I’ll know that I need to get my arse in gear.
3. Like a lot of people, I spend roughly 98% of my time in front of the computer. I’m addicted to the internets and I like blogging, so I figure that this is one way to trick myself to doing my work. After all, I’m not working, I’m providing content to you, the random web surfer.
4. Along those lines, this blog will hopefully keep me writing. For my thesis, I found myself, writing a small section and then not touching it for a couple of weeks, only to find that it was hard to get back to writing. This way, I will hopefully be writing at least once a week on my dissertation.
5. A lot of the work of research is done on the internets. Random news articles, documents available online, and other important websites, so again, this is a good place to collect those things and keep them all in one place where I can find them easier.
6. It gives me a chance to try out the WordPress blogging platform. I do the Ragin’ Asian blog with blogger, and while it is functional, there are a couple of things about blogger that are annoying. All of the cool kids seem to be using WordPress saying it is more customizable and all that stuff. I am also hosting the blog on my own domain, www.bobngo.com, so that involves SQL databases and PHP, so again, I’m not working, I’m just geeking out on computer crap.
7. It allows various people, including my committee (hint, hint) to make comments about the work I’ve done so far. In addition to documenting logistic stuff, I’ll probably post a lot on some ideas, you know, the thinking out loud kind of thing. Hopefully my friends, colleagues, and others who happen to run across my stuff can help me crystallize my thinking.
8. This next one is actually one of the most important things to me. This blog will allow the subjects of my research, the Sabermetric community, to understand a little better what exactly it is that I am doing. More importantly as well, I also welcome their feedback and their comments.
9. Blogs are essentially vanity projects. I am vain. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that I would do a blog. No seriously, a dissertation is one of those things that I think is highly personal. My adviser, Jon Cruz says that it is your statement to the academic community of what kind of scholar you are going to be. In other words, it basically defines you. And really, why should it not? I’ve spent a greater part of my life in the academy and this is basically the last thing that I’m going to do as a student. It just feels like it should be completely representative of me in a professional and personal way, and I want it to be good, so the pressure’s on. Maybe one day I’ll look back and laugh at all of this, but right now this project is one of the biggest and most significant tasks that I have undertaken in my 23 years of living. Just kidding, I’m 31. God that’s depressing, somebody please just put a bullet in my head.

Anyways, there you go. A brief, yet somehow long-winded explanation of my own little pedagogical experiment. If all goes well, this blog will terminate sometime in the next twelve to fifteen months. And if this little blog works out, perhaps others who are about to embark on their own dissertational journey will have a rough blueprint of one person’s experience of the road to Doctor-of-Letters-dom.