Website

I've been working on a post for another blog on my recent fossil excavation, and I'll provide the link to that when it goes up. In the mean time, I thought I would share my academic website. Basically the idea is to have a resource with my academic and professional stuff. It's not done, and I could use some advice if people want to give it.

https://sites.google.com/site/melpardi/

Blue Screen of Death

I'll skip the apology about being absent for the past month.

Yesterday I returned to my desk and was greeted by a big blue screen with scary white writing on my computer. I have no idea what any of this gibberish meant, but nothing good ever comes from the blue screen of death.

I restarted my computer and everything seemed to be fine, I was even able to recover the one sentence I had written in a Word document I had been working on. I have no idea what caused this hiccup, but as far as I can tell everything seems normal. But it sure is scary to come back to your computer, one where you haven't saved any back-ups in a while, and see this:

I have the time to write this post mid-afternoon on a Tuesday because I am currently backing up everything on my computer onto an external hard drive. Yesterday, I backed up my operating system. I've been stupidly lax, even though I've had disasters happen in the past. Many years ago, I lost my entire undergraduate thesis (twice). Rebuilding research, after months of work, is absolutely heartbreaking. And nothing can induce a panic attack in a graduate student quite like the prospect of having months or years of work lost. Gone. In an instant.

So it might be over kill, but I now have weekly back-ups scheduled from now until the end of time.

Lofty and Ambitious Goals

Okay! Semester is off to a good start so far. I haven't been to all of my classes as of yet, and I'm not sure where my schedule is going to settle, but it looks promising. I'm still somewhat stuck in vacation mode, and it was really nice getting out of New Mexico for a couple weeks to visit family and friends before things got busy again. I was pretty desperate to see the ocean and sleep on a beach, and I was successful in checking that off my list of to-dos for the year. I came back from CT more tan than I ever get in NM, probably because I'm so paranoid about sunburns here that I slather myself in sunscreen pretty religiously.

Classes and work aside, I have some personal goals and things I'd like to see happen over the next couple months. I really want to get back into music, I really regret letting that part of me atrophy since college. Starting next week I'm going to schedule daily bass practice, at least 40 minutes a day. Given that I kind of putz around my apartment aimlessly every morning before getting myself out the door, I can easily reallocate this time to playing my electric. If I can commit myself to this successfully for a couple months, I'm going to sell my old upright that I left in CT and allow myself to buy a new one out here in NM. I've also acquired a contact for a voice instructor, and I'd love to take singing lessons and get back into singing somewhat seriously.

Exercise. I kind of became a gym rat over the summer, going for a couple hours roughly 5 times a week. I'd be happy exercising at least 3 times a week while the semester is going, because I turn into an antsy wreck if I sit around for too long at my desk. I'm not sure how I'm going to make this work, running and lifting during the day means I'm sweaty and gross for the remainder of the day, but going at night means I'm taking the bus in the dark, which is kind of sketchy. I might need to get a parking pass to make this doable.

And I am going to harass Russ until we get our papers written and done. There's no reason I shouldn't have at least 2 papers published from my master's research by the end of the spring.

COMMON!

Summer is gone... sigh

The new semester starts in 3 days, and I realize that I haven't posted in over a month. Part of the reason is that I found myself a little burnt out and discouraged. The other reason is that I have been taking a mental siesta during this time.

Let's just say the past few months haven't exactly gone according to plan. In my last post I was lamenting about how no matter how much time or effort I was putting into writing, it never reaches completion. A few weeks after writing that post my working group turned in the third(?) version of our review paper for my adviser to look over. Then we didn't hear anything for a few weeks. After making three figures, editing the crap out of the paper, and various people (including myself) leaving town, I more or less had moved on from this project. In my naivety I figured we were more or less done. Oh how wrong I was.

I strolled into my office the other day, my first day back at my desk for almost 3 weeks, and the first thing I see is our paper on my chair. Bleeding. It actually had more comments on it than the previous version. This isn't the end of the world, the figures aren't going to change and the edits are somewhat minor, but COMMON! I'm so over this.

Here's the thing. It's already a really well written paper, I have no problem saying that. Many of the edits are wordsmithing or tweaking, and I'm just not up for this. Granted, some of them are worth following up on, but others kind of change the meaning of what was originally written. And that drives me nuts. I've gone over all the comments, and Meghan and I are going to work on this some over the weekend or next week.Then maybe it'll be done? Maybe?

I also discovered another orphaned paper that somehow ended up on my desk: a non-dissertation related side project left over from a class last semester. I contacted the people involved with it yesterday to see if we could resurrect it and get it done, but so far I have heard nothing. I've decided I'm not even going to worry about it, it's not going anywhere as far as I'm concerned, and I can come back to it whenever. I just don't want to see it never come to completion, especially since so many man hours have already gone into it.

Since I'm not made of time or energy, I'm going to have to start forcing myself to not work so much on side projects. They have their place, but right now I have dissertation proposals to write and comps to get ready for.

Asymptotes

"In analytic geometry, an asymptote of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as they tend to infinity." -Wikipedia

Figure 1. Time, effort, and perfection. You're never gonna get there.
http://joyfulpublicspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/02/effort-and-asymptote.html

That is, the curve never actually reaches the line. It just gets really, really, really close.


Such is the case with "finishing" an academic project. In my case the "curve" is the paper I've been working on, but really it could be anything academic. A thesis, a project, and experiment, etc. etc. Whatever. The "line" is the completion status of the thing I'm working on. And no matter how hard I work on it, no matter how much time I put into it, I will never ever reach completion. It simply won't happen.


For me, the hardest parts of writing a paper are the very beginning and the very end. The beginning is rough because I have a difficult time building up motivation and getting over the initial hump; but, once I start writing I see the progress being made and it comes easier. The end is even more painful to get through, however, and it is all because of this asymptotic approach to completion. The last 10% of a paper takes an absurd amount of time to get through.


I know perfectly well this paper will never be good enough for my own standards. I know that eventually I'm going to have to just let it go, because any more time invested in it will just give me diminishing returns (see Figure 1). It just eventually becomes more work than it is worth. And that is how you know when a project is "done", even if it technically isn't. 

Because it can't be. It's mathematically impossible. And there's no use driving yourself crazy over it.


But for me, for right now, I think I've yet to reach that critical point where I feel like I'm wasting my time. So I'm off to the crazy factory for a couple more days of staring blankly at my computer screen. 

I'll stop if I start to go cross-eyed.

Academic Flailing

This is a topic I've intended to write on for a while now: academic flailing. I'm bringing this up now because I've been trying to learn how to do something new all on my own and it's taken me months to only be half successful with nothing to really show for it yet.

What's been going on is I have been working on a paper with some friends/colleagues since December. We originally intended to have the paper written and submitted some time in February or March. If you check the time stamp on this post you'll note that I'm writing this in mid June. So we're a "little" off target, needless to say.

The paper is, broadly speaking, a review on niche modeling. Somehow or another it was determined that we should DO a species distribution model to make a figure illustrating some of the points we were making in the paper. The only problem is that no one in our group does this kind of modeling. And I ended up being the one to take on this task while writing and editing continued.

Cut to the punch line: it's been two months, I've sort of learned enough about what I'm doing to be dangerous, but the result thus far hasn't ended up being particularly useful. I'm stubborn as hell and I'm going to do this, but I'm getting frustrated and exhausted fighting with this thing day after day, week after week (month after month). It's been a very steep learning curve, trying to teach myself how to do this thing no one in my lab knows how to do. I would seek out the help of outside people, but I feel like I need a basic understanding before I can even begin to ask them intelligent questions.

And so I've been flailing.

Science is, often, directed flailing. You flail, and flail, and then flail some more. And then sometimes, maybe, you end up somewhere. It's a lot like me swimming. I can keep myself from drowning, and if I point myself in a particular direction I can get from point A to point B. But it isn't pretty to watch.

It's kind of a funny analogy, unless you're the one who's been trying to keep their head above water for an obscene amount of time. And I'm tired, damn it.

Back to Reality

I fully intended to blog about my vacation with my mom, but a lack of reliable internet sort of put a damper on that plan. It is also completely non-academic, and although I have posted about things other than graduate school on this blog, I don't want to make that too much of a habit.

I will say though, vacations are important for maintaining the sanity of a graduate student. We all need breaks, and anyone who tells you any different is a dirty filthy liar. Our trip to Arizona was one of the better vacations I've taken in a long time, and it was nice to finally see the Grand Canyon. It wouldn't be the kind of thing I'd want to do every year; but, sometimes just staring over something so vast and outside of yourself is what you need to bring everything else in reality back into perspective. It's the main reason I miss being close to an ocean, and why I want to see the Pacific some day.

Hance Rapids. Taken with my mobile, so forgive the lousy quality.

But now I'm back to reality. First, I'm going to do the cliche thing and comment on how I can't believe that it is June already. I'm completely unapologetic about this. Summer intercession is almost over, and come Monday there will once again be college students wandering about. This won't change my working environment much, though. Working in my office over the past few weeks has been incredibly boring. No one is around, and by that I mean I sit in my office for 8 hours by myself, only seeing other human beings when I leave to go to the bathroom or get food/coffee. The PiBBS space is a different world when classes aren't in session. Furthermore, I think a lot of other people are traveling, so it is extra dead.

Another dose of reality came recently when I finally got my rejection letter for a big grant I had applied for back in the fall. The big yellow envelope of depression showed up right before I was going to Arizona, so I put off reading its contents until I got back. I finally went over the reviewer comments the other day. I had myself mentally prepared to get ripped to shreds, but it actually wasn't that bad. I agreed with pretty much everything the reviewers had to say, and they will help me write a stronger proposal for the next go around. Three years of support is just too good to not try again. I didn't really expect to get it this time around, they only funded something like 80 proposals with this particular award.

The reviews I got were also mixed. One reviewer rated my entire application as "fair" and provided the most detailed comments and criticisms. The other two rated it as "good" and "excellent". Even I know that my application wasn't "excellent", so I'm going to just go ahead and average everything out and say that I did "good" on my first attempt. Which isn't too shabby. All three reviewers commented that the whole proposal was really well written. The primary complaints were that I didn't elaborate more on my methods and statistics and that I was vague about the broader impacts. It was only a 5 page proposal, so I'm going to have to really try to fit some of these details in and trim up other areas. I'll also have some publications by the time I try again, so that will also boost my application.

The complaints about my broader impacts section kind of threw me, however. Almost all funding agencies now require applicants to explain how they are going to make the world a better place with their research. Kind of like a Miss America pageant for scientists. I thought I had included enough in this section, but clearly not. Apparently they wanted to know how the specific project I was proposing would be relevant to my community (aka NM). I was more broad about how my activities as a scientist were beneficial to my community. Wrong! Looking back on it, I can easily make my project applicable to NM because it is on the role of large carnivores in communities. NM has a lot of issues with wolf populations and managing their larger carnivores, so this should have been a no brainer. But I wasn't sure what they wanted from me and I gave them the "wrong" thing. Next time I'll know better. These sections are becoming more important and less of a kiss-off, and now I know to put more into it.

The next month is going to be all about me tying up loose ends with projects, and thinking about my comprehensive exams. I'm thinking those will happen in the fall, but I'm kind of on the fence about it. We'll see.