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Re: Need ideas for a project

Posted by caraher on November 11, 2008, at 5:08:22

In reply to Re: Need ideas for a project » caraher, posted by Quintal on November 9, 2008, at 19:28:05

I forgot to add that most of my time in grad school I was supposed to be doing research, and the challenge there is that it's so open-ended. With courses there was some structure, and I could say I need to be in location X at time T because there is an exam and it would stick. But with the kind of lab research I was doing I needed to be in the lab to make progress, but there was almost no particular time I needed to be there. So it felt like I was always supposed to be there, but always had a lot of flexibility not to be there if I had reason to do something else.

The problem this tended to cause was that I would enter long periods where my research was stymied and I'd feel hopeless about it. I'd feel like I wasn't doing much good in the lab, and my wife would pressure me about child care. One summer when I was having depression problems that mushroomed into my babysitting another family's child and watching our own boys all morning, since I was having trouble getting out of the house anyway. (In other words, the approach wasn't, "What can I do to become productive and get out of grad school sooner?" but "As long as I'm a lazy depressed piece of crap we might as well save some money by staying home while my wife is at work and maybe going into the lab in the afternoons.")

The other problem that would happen is that even when I was being productive, frequently decent data would start to roll in around 3 AM. That tended to mesh poorly with schedules for getting kids off to school, etc.


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