Soon I'll be ready to start getting ready...
Handed in the first part of my fricking comp.
To explain: for my PhD, I have to submit a "Special Comprehensive" (those quotation marks are marks of sarcasm), which for the Social area takes the form of 1. putting together a pretend Intro to Social Psych course, with 26 lecture outlines, and 2. Whatever the faculty wants, likely a paper reflecting on something like "what are the most important recent developments in the field." My semi-self-imposed deadline for the first part was Friday.
I say "semi-self-imposed" because I had to remind my supervisor that I'd be handing it in. Oh, the hilarious laissez-faire supervision, it burns! (well, not really - he's not even the laissez-ist.)
Aaaaanyway. I think the point where I began to realize that it was going to suck was when I spent a whole day trying to fit the entirety of social psych into 26 bite-sized chunks. This, my friends, is IMPOSSIBLE. There's just too much!
... and then it became clear that "Psh, a two-page lecture outline? EASY!" was a little. Optimistic? Yeah. Each one of those suckers took at minimum 2 hours. More usually they took 3 or 4. I think the problem was that I was working from between 3 and 5 textbooks, and then I'd get distracted about what I thought should be presented, and I'd go hunting for original articles. That, or I'd spend a really long time thinking of real-life examples, which is ironic because...
... I started running into course material everywhere. Like, that's one of the cool things about social psych - the way we're all living it. But spending 3 weeks immersed in it? You start to get resentful when it's FOLLOWING YOU AROUND during break-time. I mean, really. I just wanted ice-cream, not a chance to reflect on dissonance theory. (ie. the longer I wait for this ice cream, the better it's going to taste! WOO!)
... and FINALLY, it starts to get depressing. I think that the lowest point was when I (completely unintentionally) went from doing stuff on body-image for one lecture (research says: women are so fucked around by this, GOD) to stuff on genocide. *headdesk* Even the stuff on pro-social behaviour is depressing, because the research is really about why people so often DON'T help.
But anyway. Done and handed in. There is NO WAY the second part can be worse than that, and I don't even think that I'm tempting Fate to say it. That was rough, because of the above, and because I tend to cope avoidantly, and so actual productivity was on a steep upward curve at the end there.
So now I just have to do my poster and my talk for the conference at the beginning of July, and my submission for the NEXT conference, and then I'll be able to think about things like, y'know, what shopping I need to do for conference clothes.
I keep telling myself that I can't really complain. It's a conference in Crete. On the one hand, I have to go bathing suit shopping *shudders*. On the other hand, I have a reason that I have to go bathing suit shopping!
And then there will be London and fangirls, oh yes! :)
Have vague-but-not-assured plans of catching up on the flist. We'll see. FYI - as I recently said to cincodemaygirl, even when I'm not posting, I do tend to lurk around without commenting, or reading longer entries/fic. It's like if I don't comment, I'm not really scamming off from all the stuff I ought to be doing instead of reading LJ. ;)
To explain: for my PhD, I have to submit a "Special Comprehensive" (those quotation marks are marks of sarcasm), which for the Social area takes the form of 1. putting together a pretend Intro to Social Psych course, with 26 lecture outlines, and 2. Whatever the faculty wants, likely a paper reflecting on something like "what are the most important recent developments in the field." My semi-self-imposed deadline for the first part was Friday.
I say "semi-self-imposed" because I had to remind my supervisor that I'd be handing it in. Oh, the hilarious laissez-faire supervision, it burns! (well, not really - he's not even the laissez-ist.)
Aaaaanyway. I think the point where I began to realize that it was going to suck was when I spent a whole day trying to fit the entirety of social psych into 26 bite-sized chunks. This, my friends, is IMPOSSIBLE. There's just too much!
... and then it became clear that "Psh, a two-page lecture outline? EASY!" was a little. Optimistic? Yeah. Each one of those suckers took at minimum 2 hours. More usually they took 3 or 4. I think the problem was that I was working from between 3 and 5 textbooks, and then I'd get distracted about what I thought should be presented, and I'd go hunting for original articles. That, or I'd spend a really long time thinking of real-life examples, which is ironic because...
... I started running into course material everywhere. Like, that's one of the cool things about social psych - the way we're all living it. But spending 3 weeks immersed in it? You start to get resentful when it's FOLLOWING YOU AROUND during break-time. I mean, really. I just wanted ice-cream, not a chance to reflect on dissonance theory. (ie. the longer I wait for this ice cream, the better it's going to taste! WOO!)
... and FINALLY, it starts to get depressing. I think that the lowest point was when I (completely unintentionally) went from doing stuff on body-image for one lecture (research says: women are so fucked around by this, GOD) to stuff on genocide. *headdesk* Even the stuff on pro-social behaviour is depressing, because the research is really about why people so often DON'T help.
But anyway. Done and handed in. There is NO WAY the second part can be worse than that, and I don't even think that I'm tempting Fate to say it. That was rough, because of the above, and because I tend to cope avoidantly, and so actual productivity was on a steep upward curve at the end there.
So now I just have to do my poster and my talk for the conference at the beginning of July, and my submission for the NEXT conference, and then I'll be able to think about things like, y'know, what shopping I need to do for conference clothes.
I keep telling myself that I can't really complain. It's a conference in Crete. On the one hand, I have to go bathing suit shopping *shudders*. On the other hand, I have a reason that I have to go bathing suit shopping!
And then there will be London and fangirls, oh yes! :)
Have vague-but-not-assured plans of catching up on the flist. We'll see. FYI - as I recently said to cincodemaygirl, even when I'm not posting, I do tend to lurk around without commenting, or reading longer entries/fic. It's like if I don't comment, I'm not really scamming off from all the stuff I ought to be doing instead of reading LJ. ;)