Spidey sense
You are Spider-Man
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You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.  |
Grad School Rule
The Onion | Mead Releases New Grad-School-Ruled Notebook
According to Mead's website, the ruling lines in the grad-school-ruled notebooks will be placed 3.55 millimeters apart, making them "infinitely more practical" for postgraduate work than the 7.1 millimeter college-ruled notebooks. In addition, the standard 1.5-inch top margin normally provided for dates and headers will be halved, and the left-hand margin will be eliminated entirely.
"Just think: If you are writing a dissertation on elements of thanatopsis and necromimesis as they relate to cacaesthesian themes of mid-20th-century Irish literature, do you really want your notebook lines to be more than seven millimeters apart?" Luke said. "Of course not."
"When you're in grad school, every millimeter counts," he added.
Indulgent
Inspired by this World Cafe playlist. Note also that I was named after the Donovan song (thus indirectly, this woman).
Jennifer Juniper - Donovan
Jennifer's Rabbit - Tom Paxton
Jennifer Save Me - Golden Smog
Jennifer's Body - Hole
27 Jennifers - Mike Doughty
Jennifer - Eurythmics
Jennifer - Letters To Cleo
Jennifer - Q-Burns Abstract Message
Jenny Come Away - Rockapella
Jenny - Cross Canadian Ragweed
Jenny - The Killers
Jenny - Harry Chapin
Jenny - Russell Thompkins, Jr. & The Stylistics
Jenny - Sleater-Kinney
Jenny - The Click Five
Jenny Picking Cockles/Colliers - Niamh Parsons
867-5309 (Jenny) - Less Than Jake
Jenny Says - Cowboy Mouth
Jenny Don't Be Hasty - These Streets Paolo Nutini
Jenny's Got a Pony - Los Lobos
Driver's Seat - D.H.T. Featuring Edmée
Keep Your Hat On Jenny - Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez
Poor Jenny - The Everly Brothers
Jenny Take A Ride - Mitch Ryder And The Detroit Wheels
Pirate Jenny - Nina Simone
Jenny, You're Barely Alive - Rilo Kiley
Jennie's All Right - Slaid Cleaves
Jenny Jenkins - Lisa Loeb
The Ballad of Jenny Rae - BoDeans
Jennie Lee - Jan & Dean
Jen Doesn't Like Me - Less Than Jake
Making me smile
Not a whole hell of a lot is making me smile these days, as I'm neck-deep in dissertating and a million other things, but on the bright side, there's Project Runway, the Project Rungay blog, and the Project Rungay COMICS!
Only 200-something to go...
Dissertation page count: 9
Honestly? Even 9 pages feels pretty darn good to me. The biggest difference between how I'm working now and how I worked while taking my courses is that now I type my notes. Virtually everything I read is potentially of direct use to me, and so it's worth typing up the best passages along with my thoughts so as to be easily cut-and-pasted.
Academic work, too
Great advice from 43 Folders:
Creative work is mostly showing up every day and enduring a million tiny failures as you feel your way to something a bit new.
Dissertation advice
My committee has offered some great feedback, but the following, from my outside the department member, may end up being the most useful:
Hacks I used:
- Set aside time once a week to review what you've done and plan what you'll do: put that time in your planner (say, Sunday night) At that time you will go through the following files:
- Make an overall outline and outline each chapter: these outlines will be modified each week as necessary. Throw them in appropriate files and save them
- Make a overall schedule and one for the part you are working one.These will be modified a lot as you figure out how you are using your time and get better at estimating how long it will take to do each task
- Eventually, your outlines and schedules will by in sync, but at first they may seem more like wishful thinking. That's OK--the idea is not to keep to the schedule so much as it is to try to divide the work into smaller pieces and then get better at figuring out how long it takes to do the pieces. Of course, your outline will also be modified as your ideas change.
- Have an follow up/ideas file where you just throw in general things that occur to you, things people suggest
- Have files for whatever topics you identify as needing extensive research
- I made paper copies of every article I read, with detailed notes (remember this was in 1987 and I did not yet have a computer!) and kept them in binders/boxes so I could locate them easily without having to go to the library. Even after I started using a computer, I found it necessary to do this because I take notes by hand when I read, not on a computer.
- Keep running Master bibliography (god, if only Refworks had existed then!)
- I put quotations/ideas on index cards so that I could shuffle them around and lay things out on the floor as I was trying to figure out my outlines.
Organization theories
One of the fun questions I've been wrestling with lately regards how to actually organize my dissertation research. The answer thus far has included a fair amount of redundancy, but I suspect that this is a good thing (particularly if anything crashes, or is burned in a fire, or lost, or whatever--because I'm paranoid like that).
At any rate, I've set up file folders for each (likely) chapter, and as I go through the literature and data that I've already collected, I'm posting sticky notes with section headings on them and references to lit/data that should go in that section. Once I actually get to hammering out each chapter, and to refiling my material, the theory is that I'll be able to use the stickies to tell me what to include. Then I can cut and paste from my lit/data summaries, which have also been saved in Word and in EndNote.
I'll let y'all know if this system actually ends up being workable...
Didn't I finish this in May?
Sometimes I feel like my forthcoming journal article is never actually going to ever come out...which is especially a problem given that a few good articles ON THE SAME DAMN SUBJECT have been published in the past couple of months. Given that I originally wrote this thing four years ago, it's a little frustrating.
So now I am re-editing it one last time to include the latest literature, and maybe even make it clearer and more interesting. Yippee.
