My day, NHL draft, and research
Apparently I'm currently posting (almost) daily. Huh. Maybe because I'm having good days. I think I like it.
I had a good day today. I:
- got up at ten after staying up until 4am to watch the NHL draft, didn't feel exhausted (coffee helped.) I'm trying to change my sleep schedule so I go to bed earlier and get up earlier in the morning, so far it seems promising.
- put on clothes I recently got from my mom & felt very pretty
- bought a paper bag of delicious cherries for study breaks
- studied in the uni library with a friend for a few hours (I was there from noon until almost eight, but only some of that time was spent studying) and made some progress
- saw a rainbow on the way home :)
Throughout the day I also kept an eye on the NHL draft. I was afraid the Pens would trade some of our top prospects for wingers (Kessel is way too expensive both against the cap and in assets!) It hasn't happened yet, but it still could…
I'm happy with the Pens' picks, apart from the fact that there were only four. Sprong seems like a good find with a lot of potential. Apparently all four of our picks - all European forwards, btw - are Pens fans, cool! (So are many picks of other teams, always fun.)
My favorite at the moment, purely from a personal and not a hockey perspective, is Nikita Pavlychev. A huge Malkin fan - the first thing he retweeted after being drafted was a welcome message from a Geno parody account, which is adorable. He says he tries to model his game after Geno's, tall order but good for him! (Btw there is a crossdressing pic, why did Tumblr not tell me about this sooner. And he has a pic of Jordy grabbing Tanger's butt on his instagram. The second pic on his account is of him with a Pens cap.) He played for the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Knights with two guys who are still among his best friends: Ivan Provorov, who was drafted #7 to the Flyers(!); and Denis Smirnov, who wasn't drafted at all. Excellent story material.
I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of research, or at least getting better at it. Which feels a bit ridiculous because I started studying years ago and I already wrote several papers for different classes. But for most of these papers I only needed maybe twenty sources, and I could find all of them via searches in library or journal catalogues.
Researching for my thesis feels more like a scavenger hunt. I read one article, then follow a reference to another article, follow a reference to another article, look up the author of that article, and find out she wrote another article that will be very useful. I can get that article from a library I already searched, but its keywords are so bad I didn't find it. Argh! It's nice when I find stuff, but it's frustrating that there might be so much interesting and useful material out there that I simply miss.
At least thanks to my university's credentials on the library wifi it's very easy to download articles from many different journals. (And when it's not google can usually help out.)
Today I spent eight hours at the library, and maybe two or three of those actually studying. That's actually good for me! (Man depression sucks so much.) But in that time I only managed to do some organizing of literature and to read one 60 page article & make extensive notes. It seems so little! Especially because I know how many articles I still have to read… It was an interesting article, with several aspects I could use, but nothing absolutely necessary. I could probably have skipped significant parts. By now my goal is only to finish my thesis and pass, not to reach a certain quality, and I've already learned how to do that while writing, to leave stuff out or to simplify. (It took some time!) But apparently I can't do that at the research stage (yet): what if that article I don't read mentions an extremely important aspect that I definitely have to include? Probably I'll learn how to do that when I get too frustrated by how long it takes…
I'm annoyed that I'm only now learning this, when I'm almost finished, and when I could really use already being able to do that! Oh well, better late than never. (I'm studiously ignoring the fact that it's already the end of June.)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth.
comments there.
I had a good day today. I:
- got up at ten after staying up until 4am to watch the NHL draft, didn't feel exhausted (coffee helped.) I'm trying to change my sleep schedule so I go to bed earlier and get up earlier in the morning, so far it seems promising.
- put on clothes I recently got from my mom & felt very pretty
- bought a paper bag of delicious cherries for study breaks
- studied in the uni library with a friend for a few hours (I was there from noon until almost eight, but only some of that time was spent studying) and made some progress
- saw a rainbow on the way home :)
Throughout the day I also kept an eye on the NHL draft. I was afraid the Pens would trade some of our top prospects for wingers (Kessel is way too expensive both against the cap and in assets!) It hasn't happened yet, but it still could…
I'm happy with the Pens' picks, apart from the fact that there were only four. Sprong seems like a good find with a lot of potential. Apparently all four of our picks - all European forwards, btw - are Pens fans, cool! (So are many picks of other teams, always fun.)
My favorite at the moment, purely from a personal and not a hockey perspective, is Nikita Pavlychev. A huge Malkin fan - the first thing he retweeted after being drafted was a welcome message from a Geno parody account, which is adorable. He says he tries to model his game after Geno's, tall order but good for him! (Btw there is a crossdressing pic, why did Tumblr not tell me about this sooner. And he has a pic of Jordy grabbing Tanger's butt on his instagram. The second pic on his account is of him with a Pens cap.) He played for the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Knights with two guys who are still among his best friends: Ivan Provorov, who was drafted #7 to the Flyers(!); and Denis Smirnov, who wasn't drafted at all. Excellent story material.
I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of research, or at least getting better at it. Which feels a bit ridiculous because I started studying years ago and I already wrote several papers for different classes. But for most of these papers I only needed maybe twenty sources, and I could find all of them via searches in library or journal catalogues.
Researching for my thesis feels more like a scavenger hunt. I read one article, then follow a reference to another article, follow a reference to another article, look up the author of that article, and find out she wrote another article that will be very useful. I can get that article from a library I already searched, but its keywords are so bad I didn't find it. Argh! It's nice when I find stuff, but it's frustrating that there might be so much interesting and useful material out there that I simply miss.
At least thanks to my university's credentials on the library wifi it's very easy to download articles from many different journals. (And when it's not google can usually help out.)
Today I spent eight hours at the library, and maybe two or three of those actually studying. That's actually good for me! (Man depression sucks so much.) But in that time I only managed to do some organizing of literature and to read one 60 page article & make extensive notes. It seems so little! Especially because I know how many articles I still have to read… It was an interesting article, with several aspects I could use, but nothing absolutely necessary. I could probably have skipped significant parts. By now my goal is only to finish my thesis and pass, not to reach a certain quality, and I've already learned how to do that while writing, to leave stuff out or to simplify. (It took some time!) But apparently I can't do that at the research stage (yet): what if that article I don't read mentions an extremely important aspect that I definitely have to include? Probably I'll learn how to do that when I get too frustrated by how long it takes…
I'm annoyed that I'm only now learning this, when I'm almost finished, and when I could really use already being able to do that! Oh well, better late than never. (I'm studiously ignoring the fact that it's already the end of June.)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth.
comments there.