Daily Junction

They say that students, academics and researchers live in a world of ideas. Well, yes we do – and what a dynamic world it is - so it is about time we broadcast them to the world. Daily Junction offers a line-up of different interactive discussion sections for each day of the week. Browse, select and/or interact with your favorite daily forum, ranging from the latest news in academia, news and global affairs editorials, and interviews with featured Graduate Junction researchers as well as other individuals making an impact upon your graduate community. You can subscribe to the whole blog or just your favorite days with the RSS feed in order to keep up to date with all the latest goings-on at Daily Junction.

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Procrastinations Part Deux

So, the four page a day average seems to have gone out of the window.

The problem is that no matter how thorough your initial literature review, no matter how readily you can quote facts to anyone who cares to listen and no matter how organised all your files and folders are, when push comes to shove you just can't find the damn reference anywhere. In fact it's not just that you can't remember where you put it, oh no that would be too simple, the reference has simply ceased to exist.

Vanished.

Shuffled off this mortal coil.

Pining for the fjords.

This is an ex-reference!

Eventually, of course, you do find what you were looking for. Unfortunately it turns out that it doesn't quite say what you thought it did and so you end up deleting two pages rather than adding another one. Cue a bout of late night re-reading, literature searching and drinking of strong coffee (sometimes even tea doesn't quite cut it) and you find yourself here, at three in the morning, in exactly the same place you started all those hours ago.

And so you are faced with a dilemma. Either you carry on in order to salvage some dignity from the wreckage of the day or you retire to bed, safe in the knowledge that you are in a great position to really make some headway tomorrow. In reality, however, this is a double edged sword since at this point two irrefutable truths come into play;

1 Anything you write will most likely be complete garbage.

2 Your brain has been propped up on nothing but coffee for the last five hours and there is no chance of remembering anything tomorrow.

Then the idea hits you like a bolt from the blue. Spend half an hour making some decent notes, then you don't have to write or remember anything. Genius.

Forty five minutes later you're in bed, about a minute before exhaustion takes hold. You have sweet dreams about the rapid progress you are bound to make in the morning. Tomorrow will be a good day, songs shall be sung in years to come.

It's about midday when you finally wake, your alarm clock having given up hours ago. You drag yourself out of bed to find that your housemates have put the burglar alarm on presuming you were out already. By a strange (but familiar) twist of fate the alarm doesn't go off until you are stark naked and in the shower. To top it all off the notes you have written are a complete waste of time as you can't read your own handwriting.

Perhaps this isn't going to be such a good day after all.

On a lighter note, and for all of us out there who have experienced (or will, inevitably experience) maladies of the computer through the course of our studies, I was recently reminded of this poem.

Chin up, and happy researching.

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Poster Competition Launched!!

Poster Competition Launched!! Graduate Junction is very proud to announce this really exciting opportunity. Graduate Junction is running a poster competition that will give you the opportunity to showcase your research work to the global community and at the same time give you the chance to win an iPod or a variety of cash prizes.

As a researcher, it is essential to be able to communicate your findings to as wider audience as possible. Through our poster competition we want you to have the opportunity to practice your presentation skills and communicate your findings to a broad, interdisciplinary community. Dr. Eleanor Loughlin of Durham University Graduate School will lead an international judging panel drawn from both academic and non-academic backgrounds.

The Graduate Junction community will also get the opportunity to view the judges’ top 10 entries in the following three categories Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Physical, Life and Health Sciences and then vote on their favourite!

Further details and information about how to enter can be found here.

Getting thinking and good luck!

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Procrastination

I'm currently writing my thesis, although I say this in the loosest possible sense as I'm also still doing experiments and generally finding other things to do. Like crosswords, and drinking tea.

In order to rectify this situation I decided, at the beginning of this week, to move to the library where I could write in blissful tranquility free from the distractions of the internet, my labmates and the kettle.

So off I went, laptop in hand, to find myself a desk, arrange some books and get down to the serious business of finishing my PhD. After about an hour of what could kindly be described as reasonably hard work it became apparent that all I had really achieved in this radical move was to position myself further away from the kettle. Moreover, I was in an environment where the act of drinking whilst you work is severely frowned upon. Needless to say I retreated to the tea room to regroup and mull the problem over.

Suitably refreshed I came up with a new strategy. Tomorrow I would find a quiet corner somewhere in the darkest recesses of the library and use all my guile and cunning to sneak in a flask of tea. This seemed to work out quite well for me, I wrote a whole three pages on Tuesday which might not sound like a lot, but at least is a start.

When I returned on Wednesday, I realised I'd forgotten the flask. Obviously I couldn't start writing straight away, there had to be a period of mourning for my terribly dry throat. Whilst I was sitting there in sullen silence I decided to go over what I had written so far. Not in the sense of reading it, though, more in the sense of working out how long the thing might take me to finish. I came to some quite surprising conclusions. The thought process was roughly as follows;

A reasonable estimate for the length of a thesis in the group I work in is about 300 pages. I've got three. (Cue a small subsidiary sulk about how far I had left to go). So at my current rate of writing I'll have a thesis in 100 days.

Hang on, that doesn't sound too bad. Just over three months? I'd settle for finishing at the end of August; nice weather, bit of a holiday and all that. Wonder if I could make it any sooner.

Good length of thesis, call it 260 pages. I wrote three pages without trying, so a four page average should be easy! I'll be done in 65 days! Not quite in time for my birthday, but you can't have everything. Might have cheated a bit by knocking 40 pages off the length, but even with the original 300 it's still only an extra ten days.

Having thoroughly cheered myself up, I went for a nice cup of tea.

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