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| Magnolia in Flower at the Botanics, Edinburgh |
How did this happen!? It feels like I only posted the last update a week or two ago, and now more than a month has passed?
*scanning calendar*.
Oh. Right.
Seems like I've since then learned all the ins and outs of the UK renting system (stay tuned for upcoming rant/post on that subject), gotten a pile of moving boxes dumped in my place, found a new apartment, moved house, been a week to sweden and finally been to St Andrews for a three day conference ( for which I spend about a week preparing a poster).
Time spent on thesis writing: less than I'd like.
Oh well, at least there's some areas in which I've been fairly productive since we last spoke:
Me and the supervisors sat down and went through the paper bit by bit. Well, for two hours, at which point we has barely finished the introduction, but still.
The microarray data is still causing loads of head scratching. I managed to isolate one clearcut results, which is great, but that also makes the other indications that the data is composed of pure noise a bit trickier to interpret. It's gonna be interesting to see where this will end up. At least I think I have a clear plan for how to get some methodological research out of it now.
So that's chapter 2 and 3. For the lit review, I've now signed up to an online boot camp to kick start my progress over the next week. Watch this space!
Oh, and I made a poster for the Biometrika Channel networks Conference last week. Got some good chats out of it, a Best Student Poster award, two books and a voucher :-).
One thing I would like to ask you people reading this: When a paper you're writing has yet another set of revisions with red ink all over the page, a paper that you've been reading over and over and over. How do you get going and try and make sense of all suggestions, and try and be creative?
I'm really struggling at the moment - I was hoping to do paper revision on monday, tuesday,wednesday,and thursday this week, but only managed a bit on tuesday, and got stuck really quickly. Fot some rteason, it's almost as if I'm scared of trying to read those comments again, and keep putting it off.
For today, I tried to make a structured todo-list for how to approach the suggestions:
- Re formulate suggestions as prompts
- Identify which papers that are needed for each prompt
- Freely write from the prompts not needing papers for 10-15 mins each
- Incorporate free writing as text
- Read papers needed
- Reiterate from 3)
- work on something else when my mind is saturated.
It worked for about an hour and a half, but then life got in the way. And I'm still not sure how to avoid getting stuck. Any tips or sympathy much appreciated!
'til next time,
Gustaf
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Current status of the thesis:
Summary: 774 words, rough sketch.
Introduction: 861 words, rough draft.
Chapter 1: 837 words, rough structure draft.
Chapter 2:5451 words, In yet another revision phase (getting closer though)
Chapter 3:300 words, outline in place, got some results, goal of what science to get
Chapter 4: 0 words.
Chapter 5: 0 words.
Bibliography:0 words.
Appendix: 0 words.
Total: 8223/50000 words. 0 more since last blog. (gulp!)
Average words per day needed until 01/04/2014: 158. (it keeps rising....)
