and so it begins
I'm really excited about this semester so far. Also somewhat terrified by my schedule. I've been getting up early every morning, biking or taking the subway into work, going to classes and meetings and the gym and trying to fit a little bit of work in there somewhere, running errands, coming home late, sometimes cooking dinner (that new experiment is going well so far), and then trying to do work but usually falling asleep early instead. My days have been full, but I still need to fit more work time in.
I gave a big talk on my research (the hour-long bananas project) on Tuesday, and about 40 people (I think?) came. It went really well. It was an expanded version of the talk I gave this summer in Vancouver, with lots of exciting new data. I am about ready to start writing this stuff up as a big journal article (after a couple minor follow ups), and it was so great to get people's ideas and responses to the work. People were really interested in it and had lots of good feedback. Since then, I've had a couple exciting meetings and email exchanges about the project. I'm really excited about research right now -- both this and some other ideas. Yay!
I'm also well into TAing my class, Lab in Cognitive Science. We're teaching undergrads (mostly juniors and seniors) to design experiments, and it's fairly time consuming sometimes. And I'm worried that some of my students aren't learning all they should -- some of them are doing quite well, but a few of them have poorly designed first projects. I have to remind myself that that's more their fault than mine, for not contacting me earlier to run things by me. Still, I want them to learn as much as possible. But there's only so much I can do about it. And emailing your TA at 5am the day before you have to run an experiment is not the best way to get feedback... Despite the issues, though, I still think the class is a great idea, and most of the students are having a lot of fun with at least some parts of it, I think.
The natural language processing class that I'm taking is heating up in terms of work -- there's a big problem set due next Friday. Sigh. I thought I'd finished my Last Problem Set Ever last year, and I was glad. But I really do think I'll get a lot out of this class if I take it for credit, and I think I'll get very little out of it if I just audit it -- I'm bad at auditing, and don't keep up on the material. This is all stuff I want to know, too, both because parts of it are useful for and related to my research, and because it would be really good to know if I ever want to go into industry. So, problem sets, here I come. I'm pretty excited about the class content.
I am auditing a seminar at Harvard on language acquisition, but in that case I feel confident about getting stuff out of it as an auditor, because auditors have to do 80% of the work, reading and presenting all the papers along with everyone else. That's because there are only 5 of us in seminar, and it wouldn't be much of a discussion without the 3 auditors. Other funny thing -- 4/5 of us are old Symbolic Systems majors from Stanford. Symbolic Systems, represent! Anyway, the syllabus is extremely cool (almost every paper is something I really am interested in), and I definitely hope that I don't get too busy for the class.
I'm also currently attending a bunch of lab meetings and reading groups -- our lab meeting, a language processing (psycholinguistics) meeting, a statistical language processing (AI) meeting, a language development meeting, a babies & statistical learning meeting... whew. I think some of those are probably going to have to go. But again -- all really useful and relevant things.
It seems like the more I try to fit into my schedule, the more I find it can hold -- I get more efficient about using my time. But at the same time, it doesn't work forever. And as the workload for everything increases, and I still want to get research done, I'm going to have to drop things, I'm sure. Or else I'm going to be really frustrated. I'm already a little annoyed that I haven't gotten to write in a couple weeks. I have had some fun weekend days off, though. And tomorrow I'm going apple picking!
I gave a big talk on my research (the hour-long bananas project) on Tuesday, and about 40 people (I think?) came. It went really well. It was an expanded version of the talk I gave this summer in Vancouver, with lots of exciting new data. I am about ready to start writing this stuff up as a big journal article (after a couple minor follow ups), and it was so great to get people's ideas and responses to the work. People were really interested in it and had lots of good feedback. Since then, I've had a couple exciting meetings and email exchanges about the project. I'm really excited about research right now -- both this and some other ideas. Yay!
I'm also well into TAing my class, Lab in Cognitive Science. We're teaching undergrads (mostly juniors and seniors) to design experiments, and it's fairly time consuming sometimes. And I'm worried that some of my students aren't learning all they should -- some of them are doing quite well, but a few of them have poorly designed first projects. I have to remind myself that that's more their fault than mine, for not contacting me earlier to run things by me. Still, I want them to learn as much as possible. But there's only so much I can do about it. And emailing your TA at 5am the day before you have to run an experiment is not the best way to get feedback... Despite the issues, though, I still think the class is a great idea, and most of the students are having a lot of fun with at least some parts of it, I think.
The natural language processing class that I'm taking is heating up in terms of work -- there's a big problem set due next Friday. Sigh. I thought I'd finished my Last Problem Set Ever last year, and I was glad. But I really do think I'll get a lot out of this class if I take it for credit, and I think I'll get very little out of it if I just audit it -- I'm bad at auditing, and don't keep up on the material. This is all stuff I want to know, too, both because parts of it are useful for and related to my research, and because it would be really good to know if I ever want to go into industry. So, problem sets, here I come. I'm pretty excited about the class content.
I am auditing a seminar at Harvard on language acquisition, but in that case I feel confident about getting stuff out of it as an auditor, because auditors have to do 80% of the work, reading and presenting all the papers along with everyone else. That's because there are only 5 of us in seminar, and it wouldn't be much of a discussion without the 3 auditors. Other funny thing -- 4/5 of us are old Symbolic Systems majors from Stanford. Symbolic Systems, represent! Anyway, the syllabus is extremely cool (almost every paper is something I really am interested in), and I definitely hope that I don't get too busy for the class.
I'm also currently attending a bunch of lab meetings and reading groups -- our lab meeting, a language processing (psycholinguistics) meeting, a statistical language processing (AI) meeting, a language development meeting, a babies & statistical learning meeting... whew. I think some of those are probably going to have to go. But again -- all really useful and relevant things.
It seems like the more I try to fit into my schedule, the more I find it can hold -- I get more efficient about using my time. But at the same time, it doesn't work forever. And as the workload for everything increases, and I still want to get research done, I'm going to have to drop things, I'm sure. Or else I'm going to be really frustrated. I'm already a little annoyed that I haven't gotten to write in a couple weeks. I have had some fun weekend days off, though. And tomorrow I'm going apple picking!