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Sunday, January 23, 2005
UNICORNS AND RAINBOWS
OK.....So.......
I've been sleeping a little better. Not awesome (or aweseom, if you prefer). I'm still awake for about one-quarter to half the time I spend in bed, on average. But it's better than it was for awhile there, where I was getting about 1-3 hours/night. If my non-sleep was stress-related, I can see why it's gotten better. Suddenly, my data just became ready to analyze. Magically, almost. I have some processing, and some methods, to work out still (pesky spatial autocorrelation and stuff), but at least I'm past that point where I was looking at over 1300 data points and just feeling sad because it was too much for a guy to deal with. So...the analysis stage might take me as long as 2 weeks, which would make me done & ready to write by Feb. 6, at the latest, which gives me 2-3 weeks to write, before I have to give my thesis to my committee. Actually, I'm hoping to continue writing on the side while doing analysis, so it won't be too bad. Despite everyone else's apprehension about me being able to write in that amount of time (everyone insists it will take me a month of writing), I'll probably defend about the first or second week of March, and have the rest of the time to polish my presentation for Association of American Geographers, and get ready to go to Europe and move or whatever. Oh, and to get as much as I can done on two related but separate projects, and start writing them....maybe I'll just leave them for my advisor to do...
I have a phone interview on Tuesday with a dude at U. of Wisconsin. For those not in the loop: I applied for a research assistantship being offered at the Forest Ecol. & Mgt. dept. at U. of Wisc-Madison. It's a better geography department than most geography departments. There were 63 people that applied, and only 2 positions open. I'm down to the final round now - not sure how many others are in the pool, but it's 10 or less, and after talking to this guy last week, my current advisor, Bill, who knows the guy a little, said he would be very surprised if I wasn't offered the position. So more information about that later. For now, I'll just say it would be a kickass project and I would be on target to get a PhD in 3-4 years. Way better than my current grad school experience where I didn't really even have a project in place until about January of last year, and have had to scramble to make progress...And I might have a good excuse to learn Romanian.
Perhaps these two things - making good thesis progress, and having even a somewhat solid idea about our plans after Laramie - are relaxing me somewhat.
'Tiska! So...don't forget that west Chicago is less than 2 hours from Madison...we could stand side by side on the WI-IL border on the shore of Lake Michigan and fish with our respective in-state licenses....Let me know whats up with that, since you don't seem to respond to email...punk.
Anything else? Weather has been strange here...50s. Today we played frisbee golf, and we were in t-shirts. Crazy.
Rawkstah just celebrated his 300th blog entry. I'm proud (or perhaps ashamed) to say that I've recently passed the 400 mark. Bennett has had his blog for at least 6 months longer than me, probably. This probably means 2 things: 1) I have had jobs where I had access to the internet, and 2) My posts are probably more low-budget than his.
-m
OK.....So.......
I've been sleeping a little better. Not awesome (or aweseom, if you prefer). I'm still awake for about one-quarter to half the time I spend in bed, on average. But it's better than it was for awhile there, where I was getting about 1-3 hours/night. If my non-sleep was stress-related, I can see why it's gotten better. Suddenly, my data just became ready to analyze. Magically, almost. I have some processing, and some methods, to work out still (pesky spatial autocorrelation and stuff), but at least I'm past that point where I was looking at over 1300 data points and just feeling sad because it was too much for a guy to deal with. So...the analysis stage might take me as long as 2 weeks, which would make me done & ready to write by Feb. 6, at the latest, which gives me 2-3 weeks to write, before I have to give my thesis to my committee. Actually, I'm hoping to continue writing on the side while doing analysis, so it won't be too bad. Despite everyone else's apprehension about me being able to write in that amount of time (everyone insists it will take me a month of writing), I'll probably defend about the first or second week of March, and have the rest of the time to polish my presentation for Association of American Geographers, and get ready to go to Europe and move or whatever. Oh, and to get as much as I can done on two related but separate projects, and start writing them....maybe I'll just leave them for my advisor to do...
I have a phone interview on Tuesday with a dude at U. of Wisconsin. For those not in the loop: I applied for a research assistantship being offered at the Forest Ecol. & Mgt. dept. at U. of Wisc-Madison. It's a better geography department than most geography departments. There were 63 people that applied, and only 2 positions open. I'm down to the final round now - not sure how many others are in the pool, but it's 10 or less, and after talking to this guy last week, my current advisor, Bill, who knows the guy a little, said he would be very surprised if I wasn't offered the position. So more information about that later. For now, I'll just say it would be a kickass project and I would be on target to get a PhD in 3-4 years. Way better than my current grad school experience where I didn't really even have a project in place until about January of last year, and have had to scramble to make progress...And I might have a good excuse to learn Romanian.
Perhaps these two things - making good thesis progress, and having even a somewhat solid idea about our plans after Laramie - are relaxing me somewhat.
'Tiska! So...don't forget that west Chicago is less than 2 hours from Madison...we could stand side by side on the WI-IL border on the shore of Lake Michigan and fish with our respective in-state licenses....Let me know whats up with that, since you don't seem to respond to email...punk.
Anything else? Weather has been strange here...50s. Today we played frisbee golf, and we were in t-shirts. Crazy.
Rawkstah just celebrated his 300th blog entry. I'm proud (or perhaps ashamed) to say that I've recently passed the 400 mark. Bennett has had his blog for at least 6 months longer than me, probably. This probably means 2 things: 1) I have had jobs where I had access to the internet, and 2) My posts are probably more low-budget than his.
-m
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