Retrospective: Everything I needed to know about Graduate School, I learned at a conference

I’m coming towards the end of my first year in a PhD program. That’s almost entirely accurate. I’ve been in another program that would have eventually resulted in a PhD in philosophy, but since I left with a Master’s degree, it doesn’t count. But now I’m 15 hours into a PhD in rhetoric and scientific [...]

Winding Down Before Gearing Back Up.

The semester is thankfully nearly over. While I do have about 150 pages of grading to do, I get to start that on Friday, giving me plenty of time to work it all out. And while I do have two major papers, drafts for both are finished (thanks to me forgoing Thanksgiving). There will also [...]

Difficult to say, but I think I’ve pushed too hard.

This week I read, among other things, “Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Research” by Charney, “Working Memory in an Editing Task” by Hayes and Chenowith, and caught up on my reading about Empirical research. In reading all this, the major conclusion I’ve come to is that while Empirical research is interesting, and while the conclusions this research [...]

The Burning Question

When I was in college, I came to the conclusion that the only way to really go through with a PhD was to have a burning question, something that kept me up at night, that demanded my constant consideration. I should say that by ‘came to this conclusion,’ I mostly mean that I was told [...]

On starting again

I’ve finally started getting back to work. Apparently, I needed more of a break than I thought I did. Between moving house, getting to know a new town, starting to build a network of friends, and learning my way around the campus, there hasn’t been all that much time for real work. Thankfully, that’s starting [...]

Passing time and thinking about Immortality

There is not as much research being done as I had hoped there would be. I wanted to get back into academic reading, and start posting regularly to this blog. Unfortunately, or fortunately, my brain decided, as it often does over the summer, that I need time off. So I haven’t been able to read [...]

One foot firmly on the threshhold, packing up

I’m very nearly finished my thesis. I achieved the non-content goals (4 pages of citations, more than 40 pages of text) without problem, and I believe I’ve answered all (or most) of the comments I was given on an older draft. Point is, I’m feeling like it’s almost over. The End is Nigh! but in [...]

The clock ticks

About a week ago, my adviser asked me if I had started packing yet (I’m moving to another school for a PhD program next year). I responded “Not physically.” He laughed. I hadn’t meant it as a joke. At the time, I thought I meant just that while I had started planning how to pack [...]

Philosophy vs. Rhetoric

Over the weekend, I was visiting a school that will soon be my new home. It was a recruitment weekend, and while it was exhausting, it was lots of fun and felt like a vacation. The hardest part, in many ways, was keeping myself separate and trying not to allow myself to be woo’ed, though [...]

The dreaded ‘Second Half’

The paper on discount peer response went, in my opinion, very well. I’m quite proud of it. There are issues that still need to be addressed, and there will be revisions that still need to be made, but for the most part, it’s pretty solid. In terms of my thesis, that word has come down [...]