Great fun

I had a lot of fun at work today.  Even with my upcoming deadlines I am still enjoying my jobs in the lab.  I spent the entire day uninterrupted and I was able to continue on collecting data for my talk.

I didn't spend any time formatting my slides, but I am planning to focus on these all day Thursday.

End of term

Today was a Monday, which as always means a busy day.  This morning I was able to get a run in on an instrument in the lab, but otherwise I wasn't able to accomplish much else.  At noon the PGSA held it's AGM which means I am official out of a job; as of the meeting, I am no longer President.  Over the next couple weeks I will be helping out the new Executive Board, but my responsibilities in the Association are coming to an end.  In the afternoon I was off campus volunteering.

I've been organising in my head my plan of attack for tomorrow and I have notes made out to get the most from my workday.  My goal is to have a practise talk on Friday which will require a solid effort over the next couple of days.

Week in advance: 5-11 October

I am feeling the pressure!  There's nothing like an upcoming conference talk to get the blood flowing.  I have one week of work left and I am looking to make the most of it.  The only challenge is that my Monday and Friday are pretty much no good.  Tomorrow I have an AGM for the PGSA followed by an afternoon of volunteering.  And on Friday I am leading a retreat for the new PGSA Executive Board and giving a practice talk to my lab group.

The good news is that the rest of my week is rather straight forward... finish my presentation!  I have enough data for my talk, but as a secondary task this week, I'll try to get a bit more work done in tandem to preparing my slides.  This might even be the best position I've been in before a talk.  I already have an outline of my talk and place holders for each slides, I just need to fill in the figures and add a splash of text.

Week in review: 28 September-4 October

This week was a mix of emotions.  On the one hand, I continued to make progress in the lab, I tied up a number of PGSA "loose ends" and I nearly completed my weekly to do list.  However, stresses from finances, visa renewals and upcoming travel have negated my positivity.  I've been going to work this week, charging ahead, but I felt like I was in a funk.  I've talked before about the ups and downs of PhD studies and I am not too concerned about the past few days as I figure it was just a "low" week.  Despite my mood, I was able to keep on task as I had a thought out to do list.  And looking back, this list was possibly doubly effective... not only did it keep me focused on work, but ticking jobs off the list helped (in a small way) to improve my attitude.

300 days to go

Work today was rather uneventful.  A typical day in the lab and at my desk.  I set-up an experiment that I'll run tomorrow and I spent a few hours in the afternoon preparing my talk for the workshop later this month.  However, when loaded my blog this evening to write my post, I noticed that there are 300 days until thesis submission.  This particularly worries me, not so much because of the work leading up to turning in my thesis, but because of the drama associated with the final year of PhD study (at least at my university).  In a nutshell the final year is plagued with visa renewals, financial uncertainty and tedious paperwork.  All of which are burdens not faced when you're in the middle of your studies.  Even without looking at the countdown clock this evening, I have already been distracted and bothered this week by these final years stresses, which are a very real part of studying at my school.

Standard day

This morning I took my time to get into work.  I think I am getting sick, but all I can do is refuse to acknowledge the body's signals.  When I arrived on campus today, I meet with the PGSA Executive Assistant for about an hour and then headed onto my office.  I was able to work on some analysis of the data I collected yesterday and I took some time to prepare another small grant application.  At the end of the day, I stayed a bit late as I had a 2 hour conversation about an upcoming research project with another student in our lab.

A long day

Today was a particularly long day; an early start with a late night.  Most of the day was spent in the lab running experiments and looking at data.  I am happy with the amount of work I accomplished and I am even finding some fun in troubleshooting data from our custom instruments.

While my lab work is going well, I am becoming a bit nervous for my upcoming workshop.  Additionally, with the recent developments in the lab, my supervisor is pushing for a publication in the next month.  I am completely and utterly terrified of the thought of preparing a manuscript.  Also, I fear I'll have trouble finding the motivation to work on the paper and that I'll stray to other work.

On a side note, this evening I attend a Student Representation Celebration at school where a number of outstanding students were recognised for their contributions to the University.  It was wonderful to be there with others from the PGSA to share in the excitement.