Welcome to the latest addition of the Carnival of GRADual Progress. It's a little late, I know, but... I'm a grad student. So, doesn't that make procrastination as just part of the norm? For this carnival I focused on learning experiences. After reading a lot of posts, I'm beginning to think that the entirety of grad school is a learning experience-- that is aside from the academics.
First, Jennie at Just a girl wrote about her struggles with her dissertation and her advisor. She included a very helpful dissertation calculator for setting a timeline for dissertation progress. However, if you need a little external motivation Psyc Girl has started a writing support group at Aphasic Grad Students. However, it's not just for writing as she states:
I use "writing" loosely too. You won't literally write every time you sit down to use your writing time. Sometimes we need to read articles, or run analyses, etc.
A lot of people in the blogosphere seem to be having a problem with budgeting their time. Elle, PhD discusses her need for a time budget. KikiBe talks about trying to determine where her time goes by performing a time audit. This is something I've been trying to do by using SlimTimer.
EcoGeoFemme at The Happy Scientist learns to recognize her perfectionism and how that effects her graduate studies. She also relates this to imposter syndrome, which it seems that many people have. However, a lot of perfectionism seems to lead to a never ending cycle of working hard and then getting burnt out. This is something that the Quiche discusses over at 10 year plan: 1. Graduate....
One learning experience that is common to all of us grad students is: The Dissertation. Anastasia talks about having a really hard time staying motivated while working on her dissertation. And is there any wonder with the random feedback she's getting from her committee? Green Garbo discusses The Five Emotions of Thesis Writing. I'm still firmly entrenched in the first two. I'm hoping that robot comes sooner rather than later. Marc comes up with a rather unusual way to jumpstart his dissertation. Finally, Philosophy Factory asks for Dissertation Advice, please. So, I encourage everyone to pop on over there and share your best dissertation advice.
The best learning experiences of all, I think, are the ones where we learn to cope with grad school. Psyc Girl takes a Mental Health Afternoon and learns to not feel guilty about it. Science Girl has learned how to deal with the demands of trying to do 27,000 things at once. One of her best points is to take breaks for your sanity and The History Enthusiast emphasizes this when she talks about her new enrollment in a fun dance class. One of the many things most of us have to cope with in grad school is being short of funds most of the time. The new blog The Economical Academic has a bunch of great posts about saving money and has some great links to money saving resources. Finally, an amusing post comes from Breena Ronan at Who Doesn't Love Roses? about Academic Appearances. She gives us a field guide on how to identify people in her subfield.
Finally, I want to give a few congratulations* to:
FemaleCSGradStudent on getting a job,
Flossie on becoming ABD,
Unbalanced Reaction
and Geeka for being PHinally Done!
*If there is somebody that I've left out, please let me know. That way I can congratulate them, too!Labels: Carnival of GRADual Progress