Entries from December 2006 ↓

Defending your thesis in a war zone

Ticked off because your advisor hasn’t written back in a week?  Bent out of shape because your inbox is overflowing with emails about upcoming lectures you’ll never attend?
I heard a three minute segment on NPR’s Morning Edition today that put grad student griping in perspective.  Abdulla Mizyead talks about trying to do his thesis defense [...]

The Third and Fourth Carnivals of GRADual Progress

I don’t know how it happened, but I look up one day and almost three months have passed since I wrote about the grad student blog carnival.  (October?  November?)  Alas, there have already been two more carnivals and another one coming out next week.
These carnivals compile links to a bunch of grad student bloggers covering [...]

How to give a presentation and lose your audience in 5 seconds

I would rather get a root canal than sit through a conference where people just read their papers.  Honestly, who wants to have an academic paper read to them?  I can think of no better way to tell an audience you aren’t interested in respecting their time than to stand before them and read.
I thought [...]

Perfect Punctuation Purgatory

In one of the earlier posts I did on this website I wrote about how perfectionism and procrastination go hand in hand.  Yesterday over lunch I listened to an old podcast by Merlin Mann that illustrates that idea so…well…perfectly.  It’s a short, cautionary tale about how a tiny apostrophe derailed him on his way to [...]

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