The good news is the set in stone deadline is December 15, which means, complete or not, my work will end then. The bad news is, I’m getting absolutely bum-raped by this review work.
It was something I expected to have finished by early November. I really upped the effort during mid-October and it’s now December but I’m still no closer to finishing it!
I’m just being asked to learn too many things too soon. There are loads of biological terminology and concepts in there that I’ve no complete grasp of; understandable given my last encounter with it was during SPM. I had to wiki biological terms every odd sentence!
Add Chemistry into the mix as well, and I’m really struggling. I bought an A-Levels Chemistry book a couple of weeks ago and that really helped me understand the concepts but still, most of the chemistry involved in the papers I’m reading are really high level stuff.
It would be alright if I was just absorbing stuff off it but no, I was asked to review it, meaning providing critical commentary on something I didn’t really have a clue about! All these contributed to my slow progress as I had to do a lot of side reading on top of going through all the articles AND summarizing them into a cohesive paper, which is a lot harder than it sounds.
Strange to say, though, I’m kind of enjoying being thrown into the deep end and being forced to sink or swim. At least once I survive this (if, actually), I’ll have a fairly high understanding on my field. Doing a doctorate was never supposed to be easy anyway.
Oh, and Windows Live Writer rocks! This rant was a bit of an excuse to test out this Microsoft offering actually and I have to say, it’s made me want to blog a bit more. It' just makes things so easy.
Not kidding about the work stress, though. I can’t wait for December 15 to come!
3 comments:
dude what? you're doing a PhD now? In what field?
Yeah, in Chemical Engineering. 1 year in, already.
wow! hats off to you!
That's really fast though, I suppose you skipped your masters?
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