Wednesday
Mar052008
Honours is Harder than I Am
Wednesday, March 5, 2008 at 3:59PM “Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle of lotteries, dating & religion.”
-Scott Adams
To the above I am tempted to add postgraduate studies. It seems that for each paper I go into the workload is equivalent to an entire undergraduate semester, except that we have to do four at onceBut this is good news, I came out of my degree feeling that I didn’t really know enough, and now that I am in PG its as if everyone is saying “Surprise, you’re right, now go read these 20 articles by next week and you may be able to keep up” As you can tell, I am really being challenged. Despite having nearly abandoned my job, I still don’t see how there are enough hours in a day. So as usual its time to strategise, here’s the plan thus far:
Lectures: Now I’m no stranger to attending lectures, in fact (despite usually not arriving with a pen) my attendance was stellar throughout my undergraduate career. But it is attention that I need to sharpen. Accompanied by my beautiful Moleskine notebooks and the trusty Cornell method, I should be able to stay on top of the valuable insights given in class. Readings: Never have I had so much to read, and it’s only day 3. There’s not much to say in this space other than that I plan to do it all, I’m used to rushing off to work after a lecture, so in theory all I have to do is redirect my energy to the library and get into them. My first plan in this area is the gathering stage, I like to batch process practically everything in my life so before I tackle the vast amount of literature I want to have it all in front of me. This however requires the right… Tools: Now I could talk about these for far longer than you’d like to hear so I’ll keep it brief. My current weapon of choice is my black Macbook running Mac OSX Leopard. For managing task lists and generally Getting Things Done (GTD for the uninitiated) I use the awesome programme Omnifocus. Storage and reading of articles is managed by Papers. I do all of my writing in the seemingly perfect Scrivener with the final publishing managed by Word which really sucks Nisus Writer Pro. There are of-course many more but this is my primary Academic software workflow. Peers: Fortunately it would seem that everyone is as desperate as I am to cope with the material, so everyone is keen to make friends. Arrangements are being made to go over the readings the day before, this should help us grasp everything and encourage us to actually get them all done on time. Lecturers: There is an impressive ratio in these classes. In one I have two senior lecturers present with only 24 students. They also seem to offer a lot more time to PG students, this means its time to use those office hours, I’m already booked to discuss the first assignment.Well that’s about all for now folks, good luck with the work, study or play.
Reader Comments (6)
Holy shit, I didn't know they still made Nisus Writer. The last I remember it was on the Performas at my mother's work running OS 7.0~ish. After finding out the origins of the name Nisus though, I've always wondered why the hell they'd name it that.
I'm extremely old-fashioned in my note-taking - I just go the pen/5 subject ringbound notebook/longhand route. I thought about dusting off the MD player to start recording lectures this year... but I think that every year and don't do it, and I've heard it's more hassle than it's worth.
Mind you, most of my lectures are the old-fashioned "lecturer stands up and rambles for an hour" type, with no fancy powerpoint or anything. One of my lecturers has a massive stutter and rambles and gets easily distracted, so my notes are accordingly nonsensical in flow. Which makes it a bit tough. Flicking through now, it goes something like "Lyrics... Printing press... In course assessment... Breton Lais... Definition of popular fiction" which is all a bit awkward.
Anyway, best of luck surviving the year!
Hold on, did that comment just go through? Have you turned on moderation, or is it just mad at Safari?
Because I'm fucked if I'm typing it out again...
Sorry, I have t approve one comment from you and then all the rest should come through assuming your not too spammy :-)
Nisus writer Express has been going for a while on OSX but they just released Nisus writer pro last year. I really like it, its much easier to use than Mellel and easier on the eyes. And naturally it's a whole heap better than word with simple to use styles widow/orphan control etc. You should check it out.
Nah it's cool, I figured it would just be something like that, but it just disappeared rather quickly so it looked like some kind of bug. Plus I thought it would be kind of funny if just the second message showed up.
I use NeoOffice (well, I used it last night for the first time that is), which makes me cry ("I'm not crying... I'm just, usin' NeoOffice for the first time", perhaps?).
Have fun with the whole blogging thing. :)
Best of luck in higher academia my friend. Blog added to Google Reader.
Sent from my iPhone.
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