Sorry.
I'm digitally packing-up and moving to http://phdammit.wordpress.com.
(It's not you, it's me.)
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Curiosity & Focus
Attention is a tricky, slippery thing to study. Worse, at times, to mindfully direct. I have the unfortunate distinction of having many interests. In the academic world, this quickly becomes debilitating and paralyzing. It am not inattentive, but rather live in a state that is both hyper-attentive and all-encompassing. This state of continuous physiological arousal is wearing, and erodes the soul.
Energy--having physical and mental stamina enough to complete the task at hand--is a necessary but insufficient condition of completion. To this end, Robert Peters writes about scope in Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning a Master's or a Ph.D. An incorrectly-scoped project can quickly overwhelm both author and work, and sap energy away from both.
And this is an excellent point that Peters makes very clear. Contrasting with the approach books like Zinsser's On Writing Well and Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis, which coach writers to touch the manuscript every day to increase its bulk (for later revision), Peters spends more time with the reader talking about scope and illustrates with his own nearly-derailed dissertation.
In short, filling pages with words are necessary, but dangerous if the project is over-scoped. In fact, the common traits of the very best faculty members with whom I have worked was knowing where to focus (and with which words), and when to stop (project scope).
I am trying to improve my own focus via the Pomodoro technique. The mechanical actions prime me to the fact that I have a block of time within which I must attend nearly-exclusively to X, after which I may do Y (e.g. checking email). In short, it releases me from the worry of not doing Y by making time for it upon the completion of X. At least, it should release me from this worry. It is difficult for me not to find connections in and between everything, and I blame James Burke's Connections (it's a tremendous read well-worth the time) for this, but do not begrudge it him.
What techniques, if any, do you use to remove the guilt of not doing Y while trying to attend to X?
Energy--having physical and mental stamina enough to complete the task at hand--is a necessary but insufficient condition of completion. To this end, Robert Peters writes about scope in Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning a Master's or a Ph.D. An incorrectly-scoped project can quickly overwhelm both author and work, and sap energy away from both.
And this is an excellent point that Peters makes very clear. Contrasting with the approach books like Zinsser's On Writing Well and Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis, which coach writers to touch the manuscript every day to increase its bulk (for later revision), Peters spends more time with the reader talking about scope and illustrates with his own nearly-derailed dissertation.
In short, filling pages with words are necessary, but dangerous if the project is over-scoped. In fact, the common traits of the very best faculty members with whom I have worked was knowing where to focus (and with which words), and when to stop (project scope).
What techniques, if any, do you use to remove the guilt of not doing Y while trying to attend to X?
Monday, November 12, 2012
A quick word...
"What do you do?"
This question strikes terror into me. What do I do indeed. I "do" IT, I "do" compassion, I "do" learning and teaching, but what do you do is slang. It means, "how do you make a living?" or "what do you do in school?" or "why can't you buy a cup of coffee?"
I have been in graduate school since 2003. I earned my MS in 2005 and have been working toward a PhD. I have been done with coursework since 2006. I am still working toward the completion of my degree. Indeed, it appears that PhD is short for Pretty Huge Debt rather than a doctorate in philosophy.
If any academics read this, I "do" work at the intersection of cognitive psychology and information theory. It is "cross-cutting" and "multi-disciplinary," which NSF loves to request and universities are loathe to support (at least, at the graduate-student level). Its future implications are interesting, but the immediate task, the groundwork of future research, impossibly dull. For non-academics reading this: I "do" academic work that I find impossibly uninspiring, with no direction and zero input.
I am writing this in lieu of sleeping, and with the sad realization that this sounds eerily like a page out of a blood-soaked diary. For academics and non-academics alike, hopefully the following posts will shed some light into what higher education in America is like.
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