I didn't post November 3rd, and technically I didn't post November 4th. I claim this post as my November 4th post because I haven't slept yet.
I barely started working on research again when I got feedback from my advisor on the fellowship proposal. At least I got my mind partially wrapped around the program I need to expand. I haven't looked at it in months. Friday starts my focus on research again. Three months from today, I need to have enough done to give my seminar.
I finished the fourth draft of my fellowship proposal today. That consumed about eleven hours of the day. My life has been exceedingly dull because of this major time sink. Tomorrow should be a bit more interesting. I'll at least go out to dinner to celebrate my officemate's seminar completion. Otherwise I expect a lot of the same through Thursday to finalize the proposal.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
shopping sucks
This was an unproductive weekend. Yesterday I went to a hockey game and that's about it. Today I went bra shopping. That is a major accomplishment considering how much it usually pisses me off. Unfortunately for something that fit comfortably, I spent $100 on four bras. I hate bra shopping, I hate the bra industry, and men must design them because most of them fit like shit. And to Victoria's Secret: how can a bra possibly be worth $48? You're ridiculous.
Still no word from the advisor on any of the fellowship stuff.
I'm currently battling a migraine (again). It's not really bad, but it has potential. If this round of over-the-counter stuff doesn't work, it's on to prescription meds.
I hope tomorrow is more productive. I at least have class in the morning, ice skating around lunch time, and orchestra in the evening. I have to do something tomorrow. I also hope the advisor gets back to me in a major way on the fellowship essays and proposal.
By the way, count this as my second post of NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). My goal is to write one post here every day. Some may be short and unexciting, but this blog has gotten a slow start due to my busy semester. NaBloPoMo should provide some motivation to pay more attention to writing, which is somewhat therapeutic for me.
Still no word from the advisor on any of the fellowship stuff.
I'm currently battling a migraine (again). It's not really bad, but it has potential. If this round of over-the-counter stuff doesn't work, it's on to prescription meds.
I hope tomorrow is more productive. I at least have class in the morning, ice skating around lunch time, and orchestra in the evening. I have to do something tomorrow. I also hope the advisor gets back to me in a major way on the fellowship essays and proposal.
By the way, count this as my second post of NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). My goal is to write one post here every day. Some may be short and unexciting, but this blog has gotten a slow start due to my busy semester. NaBloPoMo should provide some motivation to pay more attention to writing, which is somewhat therapeutic for me.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
I'm trying to be patient...this is not the first time it hasn't worked very well
The boyfriend says I'm not a very patient person and in many cases he's right. This fellowship application is a prime example.
I emailed my advisor all the written portions last Thursday for him to comment on. I got comments on the first half of a two-page proposal Friday around lunch time. I emailed him an edited version that addressed all but one comment so I could get some more input on the second half and see if I'd interpreted his comments correctly.
I have yet to receive another email on the proposal. There are also two other written parts to this fellowship, neither of which he has read. I realize that he has family obligations, especially having been out of the country for two weeks and now his wife being out of town, but I really want to get this thing out of the way so I can return to research. And it's due Thursday, which doesn't leave much time for procrastinating if I do more than one round of edits on it.
Did I mention that this is my first proposal, so much of my first draft is guessing what a proposal is supposed to look like? It's going to take more than one edit to get it reasonably good and within the page limit.
It'd be nice if I could blame someone, but it's been an accidentally badly scheduled semester all around. The advisor wasn't supposed to teach, but another faculty member bailed on his class after the semester schedule was made. My advisor got to take up the slack. That means that next semester he'll be teaching one class instead of two with very little travel--just in time for both of his advisees to be studying for the qual.
Speaking of his other advisee, I feel bad for her, too, because she's trying to put together her seminar, a required part of a master's degree, so she can graduate in December. Her research has not been going as planned and she's been very stressed. It's more evidence for the bad timing of everything this semester.
I've also received preliminary news that my spring semester will be rearranged in such a way that I won't get much break over winter break, but more on that once the details are confirmed.
I emailed my advisor all the written portions last Thursday for him to comment on. I got comments on the first half of a two-page proposal Friday around lunch time. I emailed him an edited version that addressed all but one comment so I could get some more input on the second half and see if I'd interpreted his comments correctly.
I have yet to receive another email on the proposal. There are also two other written parts to this fellowship, neither of which he has read. I realize that he has family obligations, especially having been out of the country for two weeks and now his wife being out of town, but I really want to get this thing out of the way so I can return to research. And it's due Thursday, which doesn't leave much time for procrastinating if I do more than one round of edits on it.
Did I mention that this is my first proposal, so much of my first draft is guessing what a proposal is supposed to look like? It's going to take more than one edit to get it reasonably good and within the page limit.
It'd be nice if I could blame someone, but it's been an accidentally badly scheduled semester all around. The advisor wasn't supposed to teach, but another faculty member bailed on his class after the semester schedule was made. My advisor got to take up the slack. That means that next semester he'll be teaching one class instead of two with very little travel--just in time for both of his advisees to be studying for the qual.
Speaking of his other advisee, I feel bad for her, too, because she's trying to put together her seminar, a required part of a master's degree, so she can graduate in December. Her research has not been going as planned and she's been very stressed. It's more evidence for the bad timing of everything this semester.
I've also received preliminary news that my spring semester will be rearranged in such a way that I won't get much break over winter break, but more on that once the details are confirmed.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Second post of the day so I can catch up and blog about something current for once
I know, when it rains, it pours, and now I've given you two posts at once after a week and a half of nothing. At some point I'd like to return to blogging about current events. No time better than the present, right?
Recent events have caused me to disappear from my journal and blog. I hope to remedy that now that a couple of deadlines and other important dates have passed. What were these events, you may ask. Well, I'll tell you (and I'm not going to sing it)...
When I got back from the conference late on October 1st, I had to catch up on a week and a half or two weeks of class work that I'd ignored while working on my poster. It was worth ignoring classes to the extent I could because my first ever poster turned out quite nice. I was somewhat disappointed with the poster session, as I mentioned, but the poster itself looked good and had good information on it. I think the problem was more with the conference and lack of interest than the poster itself.
Back to the missed class work...I had a homework assignment due the second day back in town, which I finished on time, and loads of reading. Reading is easy to ignore.
I was also a bit burned out on research because of spending so much time working on my poster before the conference, so I needed a break. My first full week back, I did very little research and focused on classes and house stuff. Did I mention that housework was very low on my priority list? Frankly, the house was a mess. It hasn't really recovered yet and I don't expect it to recover until we have to pack everything up to move out. The boyfriend and I will be very busy next semester, wo I expect to be eating a lot out of boxes, bags, and cans.
My advisor was also very busy. He only had a week and a half before a two-week international trip to attend two conferences back-to-back. His wife had already been alone with their two small children through the other conference and single-handedly cared for them while he went to the international conferences. In the time between travel, he needed to give her a break to get some of her work done (she's finishing her dissertation). He also needed to work on a seminar, a talk or two, and a poster. I tried to bother him as little as possible.
Then the advisor was gone for two weeks in a foreign country with poor internet access. He was barely available via email. I spent the first week of that reading background papers for a fellowship proposal. The second week I worked on massive data transfer and processing. The computing cluster I was putting it on had a few issues with its setup, so those had to be worked out in the process, and I initially didn't have the permissions I needed to put the files in the correct directories. It took a large part of the week to get all that worked out. I also learned a bit more about shell and batch scripting, which I'm sure will be useful in the future.
Now that the advisor is back, things are getting a bit easier and moving more quickly. He's still busy this week because he's filling in for the person who subbed for him last week, but he'll be in town for the rest of the semester.
Recent events have caused me to disappear from my journal and blog. I hope to remedy that now that a couple of deadlines and other important dates have passed. What were these events, you may ask. Well, I'll tell you (and I'm not going to sing it)...
When I got back from the conference late on October 1st, I had to catch up on a week and a half or two weeks of class work that I'd ignored while working on my poster. It was worth ignoring classes to the extent I could because my first ever poster turned out quite nice. I was somewhat disappointed with the poster session, as I mentioned, but the poster itself looked good and had good information on it. I think the problem was more with the conference and lack of interest than the poster itself.
Back to the missed class work...I had a homework assignment due the second day back in town, which I finished on time, and loads of reading. Reading is easy to ignore.
I was also a bit burned out on research because of spending so much time working on my poster before the conference, so I needed a break. My first full week back, I did very little research and focused on classes and house stuff. Did I mention that housework was very low on my priority list? Frankly, the house was a mess. It hasn't really recovered yet and I don't expect it to recover until we have to pack everything up to move out. The boyfriend and I will be very busy next semester, wo I expect to be eating a lot out of boxes, bags, and cans.
My advisor was also very busy. He only had a week and a half before a two-week international trip to attend two conferences back-to-back. His wife had already been alone with their two small children through the other conference and single-handedly cared for them while he went to the international conferences. In the time between travel, he needed to give her a break to get some of her work done (she's finishing her dissertation). He also needed to work on a seminar, a talk or two, and a poster. I tried to bother him as little as possible.
Then the advisor was gone for two weeks in a foreign country with poor internet access. He was barely available via email. I spent the first week of that reading background papers for a fellowship proposal. The second week I worked on massive data transfer and processing. The computing cluster I was putting it on had a few issues with its setup, so those had to be worked out in the process, and I initially didn't have the permissions I needed to put the files in the correct directories. It took a large part of the week to get all that worked out. I also learned a bit more about shell and batch scripting, which I'm sure will be useful in the future.
Now that the advisor is back, things are getting a bit easier and moving more quickly. He's still busy this week because he's filling in for the person who subbed for him last week, but he'll be in town for the rest of the semester.
The long-promised post-poster post: not very exciting
Written in early October, shortly after the conference. I've been swamped with a variety of activities, which I will relate when I get a chance to write about them.
The poster presentation went well. I'm disappointed that I got so few new ideas from the poster session, but at least it gave me confidence that there is nothing terribly wrong with my research. No one asked very tough questions--many of them I had to answer with "that's part of my future work" because my current results are very preliminary. The meeting as a whole was underwhelming in quality and interest, and too long. I was ready to leave after I presented my poster.
Going back in time a bit, I think my time management worked as well as any could have. There was no way for me to know how much time my poster would require. I finished it the afternoon it was due, though I would have preferred to finish it a bit earlier in the day so I could have taken a nap. I see no reason to try to schedule my time further because I think it would only add stress to try to stick to a schedule.
As outlined in my recent post about the qual, my overall strategy will probably have to change again. I'll need to work hard and quick on research through January so I can submit the paper my advisor wants by the end of spring and have enough for a seminar in mid-late April. If those two work out, I will naturally have enough done to write my thesis over the summer (or nearly so).
I'm a bit irritated about the change in qual time, but part of that I'm sure is because I had everything planned out and had already accepted the good and bad of the situation. I'm also concerned about putting the final touches on a paper for publication while I'm preparing a seminar and studying for the qual. That is very similar to the situation my officemate would be in for the January qual. The advisor approves of either qual schedule, so at least I won't have to worry about that.
The poster presentation went well. I'm disappointed that I got so few new ideas from the poster session, but at least it gave me confidence that there is nothing terribly wrong with my research. No one asked very tough questions--many of them I had to answer with "that's part of my future work" because my current results are very preliminary. The meeting as a whole was underwhelming in quality and interest, and too long. I was ready to leave after I presented my poster.
Going back in time a bit, I think my time management worked as well as any could have. There was no way for me to know how much time my poster would require. I finished it the afternoon it was due, though I would have preferred to finish it a bit earlier in the day so I could have taken a nap. I see no reason to try to schedule my time further because I think it would only add stress to try to stick to a schedule.
As outlined in my recent post about the qual, my overall strategy will probably have to change again. I'll need to work hard and quick on research through January so I can submit the paper my advisor wants by the end of spring and have enough for a seminar in mid-late April. If those two work out, I will naturally have enough done to write my thesis over the summer (or nearly so).
I'm a bit irritated about the change in qual time, but part of that I'm sure is because I had everything planned out and had already accepted the good and bad of the situation. I'm also concerned about putting the final touches on a paper for publication while I'm preparing a seminar and studying for the qual. That is very similar to the situation my officemate would be in for the January qual. The advisor approves of either qual schedule, so at least I won't have to worry about that.
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