I've been working slowly but steadily all day on my prelim proposal. Part of what has made my progress so slow today is hunting down the right references for specific little facts. I tend not to do this very efficiently. An hour later, I'll have 8 tabs open and have added at least 6 pdfs to my 'collection.' I think I seriously spent 2 hours today reading about my field site while trying to find the proper reference for the average annual rainfall. Then I spent another hour looking for a specific reference about my critters. Why do these little things take me so long? Does anyone else have this problem?
I'm still going to be here for a while tonight. And I have to go swimming. Gotta practice my form and my tediously slow and exhausting swimming.
Someone from SFC called me today asking for donations. I've given money to them every year since graduation and encouraged all of my friends to do the same, but I decided that this year I should give them at least as much money as I give to public radio so I'm donating $10 per month.
In other random news that most of you don't give a crap about, four different SFC grads that I know have posted to Ecolog in the past few weeks (Ecolog is the listserv for the Ecological Society of America). That's way up from the typical occurrence of zero. One of them is a guy that I dated for a minute. I think he had more girlfriends during college than anyone else I know. Maybe it's because he also smelled better than anyone I've ever met (Jon knows, we've talked about this).
Ok, back to work. I know I still need to post those photos from the Natural History Museum in DC. Maybe I'll get to those later tonight.
4 comments:
my REU application essay has been a painful experience. It haunted me in my dreams last night.
Yes, I absolutely have this problem! It drives me nuts! It's always something that I know I've read, but then I go through papers I have and none of them quite say what I had in mind. It has gotten a little better over time, though, as I've stocked up references for particular facts I use a lot. I find that when I'm against a deadline as you are (especially for a draft rather than a final product) I leave those things for last with (xx) to mark where I know I need a reference. That way I don't use precious time searching for references that no one really cares about when they read a draft, instead using time to work on important parts that could benefit from input. Plus, sometimes someone will fill in a citation for one of those boring facts when they're reading for content.
Thanks for the tip EGF. I've thought about doing that before but I've been afraid that people won't find this acceptable. I guess it's probably ok as long as they don't overrun the document.
Yeah, you want your document to be as complete as possible. However, I'm sure people would rather comment on a draft that has the ideas well developed but a few missing citations than one that is confusing but has the references in place.
Good luck!
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