Plausible Accuracy

Now that I’m (mostly) past my second committee meeting, it’s time to get cracking on the end-game work.  I’ve been neglecting writing on my thesis for a bit, as I was busy in the lab trying to wrap up a few experiments to present.

There isn’t any more time to procrastinate on the writing front.  I’ve currently got 8 chapters in my thesis, and none of them have a completed draft yet.  With my defense planned for 6 months away, I need to produce 1.33 chapters a month between now and then.  My main issue is that I don’t tend to bang out a single chapter and move on, but instead dabble here or there depending on what I’m in the mood to write.  This means that I’ve gotten a start on just about every chapter (save the summary, which I probably will sit down and bang out), but none of them are in a “complete unit” that I can start handing to my advisor for proofreading/editing.

On other fronts, I’m narrowing down the professors that I’m likely to contact initially for potential post-doc positions.  At the moment I think I’ve got it down to two, and so I’m reading papers in order to familiarize myself with their research.  Hopefully within a week or so I’ll be able to compose contact letters and get the ball rolling in that department.

At the same time, I’m trying to implement some of the experiments that my committee and I discussed in the meeting.  There isn’t anything terribly complicated about this per se, but it’s just one more direction that my focus is being pulled in.

As I’ve said in previous posts, I’m beginning to think that this ability to effectively multitask is the main thing I’ve had to learn here at the end of my graduate career.  When you are a younger graduate student, you can afford to devote all of your energy and cranial juice into your research project.  This isn’t the case as you approach graduation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under career, graduate school. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.