Another day

Today I worked on some hardware designs.  Primarily I wanted to focus on blueprints, but I spent a good portion of the day revamping details of individual parts.  The issue here is that I am in New Zealand designing and planning to build hardware that will fit an instrument located on the other side of the planet (in Montana).  Additionally, the original manufacturer of the equipment (in Germany) is helping answer technical questions as needed.  It's a really cool experience to be part of a truly international collaboration, but it's sort of like the team building exercise where you tell your blindfolded friend how to build a Lego set.  All communication needs to be clear and succinct and every conversation takes a day and half to go back and forth.

For a break, this afternoon I attended a workshop, put on by a former student of our school, about finding a postdoc position.  The session was great, but it seems like there's no one size fits all solution to finding work after your PhD.  In fact, based on the number of variables, it really seems like the strategy will vary greatly between you and even your closest colleagues.  After much thought and discussion with friends, I wonder how similar finding a postdoc (or any job) after your programme is to finding a place to live.  My thought here is that shelter is a necessity and that given the pressure to find housing (or employment) you'll make do out of the options available.  Much of the feedback I've heard from former students is to start searching early.  Fair enough, but how do I know/commit/find something now that won't happen for another 6-12 months?  Would you commit to a rental house 12 months in advance?  Maybe if it's your dream, but otherwise I'd keep my options open.  Perhaps my feeling is that all this "how to find a postdoc" advice should actually be labelled "how to find the perfect postdoc".  I am still pondering these thoughts and plan to perform my own experiment over the next year, so please feel free to chime in with any comments.

Finally, this evening I was talking with my wife (a fellow PhD student) about the ups and downs of doctoral life.  Both of us are looking to submit our thesis in about 6 months and both of us are concerned with our productivity as of late.  Now each day I go to work and each day I do a days worth of work, but this doesn't seem like enough.  With 6 months left to go in my studies, I should be crunching data and writing 24 hours a day!  My thought here (and I've mentioned this before) is that I am still recovering from the mandatory two weeks off last month.  And no, I am not on vacation mode, but it has taken this long for external pressure to build back up and motivate results.  Now that seems horrible, as if the only way I get any work done is when I am told to do something, but it's something deeper than that.  It's tough to explain, but it seems as though we oscillate between periods of heavy and then low... hummm productivity isn't the right word, because it's not about the output rather the input.  We seem to build up to a frenzy and work really hard, and then crash.  Like some sort of academic sugar crash.  I notice that the fine tuning needed here is how far we let our self go, a psychological equivalent to a deadband.  I think the oscillatory behaviour is natural, but it might be possible to tune the system so that the difference between the highs and lows isn't so extreme, moderation is key.  Before the break I was all go because I knew I wanted certain work finished before the holidays, this effectively pushed me into a period of high performance which subsequently lead to my current slump.  Coming back to the acquisition of vacation mode, the vacation actually played very little into the scenario, other that the fact it prompted the big push in the lab.