Nothing prepares you for a PhD. Today is one of those days when it dawned on me that I’m in for a lot of work. Our course today is ISYS 63703 – Social Networks ISYS Research, and we were given over 10 research papers to summarize and turn in on Monday – that’s in just 5 days. The interesting thing is that we have other classes leading up to Monday, so what time is actually left to read the papers and summarize them?
One thing I have observed is that it’s very easy to be busy and unproductive at the same time – because you have a whole lot of tasks to complete and you find yourself juggling between tasks and not necessarily completing any one of them.
Today is a typical example. I spent over 6 hours in the library – the plan was to learn R, but I found myself juggling learning R, reading about the next class on social networks, and familiarizing myself with inferential statistics. Because I was spreading myself too thin, I didn’t really accomplish much. In all, I try to forgive myself, learn from my mistakes, and get better. If there’s a lesson from all this, it would be to plan my studies properly and draw up a schedule for them. There’s a mountain of things to learn and grasp in a very short while, and I believe it will be more effective if approached one at a time. In a PhD program, no one cares to teach you anything – professors just do a general introduction of your coursework and expect you to figure things out. With a PhD, no one will spoon-feed you; you just have very little time to figure things out yourself, so you better get going.
Going forward, I have decided to make it mandatory to post an article every day on this blog. I don’t know how effective that will be, but it’s something I wish to explore – even if I can’t make it every day, at least twice a week would be good.
The major task now is to figure out how to read and summarize research papers. The first place that comes to mind to check is YouTube, so I’m headed there right now.
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