I love uni in the summer. No undergrads, the weather is slightly better (if you live in the UK), no undergrads, there’s more stuff to keep you preoccupied outside the lab, you can drink outside, your adviser may or may not take a holiday (which in turn may or may not be a good thing) and also there are no undergrads. Thus I decided to go with a general summery theme to the July edition of the Carnival of GRADual Progress which I’m very pleased to be hosting this month (cheers to FrogPrincess for unleashing me on all your posts!).
For many a misguided grad student, summer offers a quieter and more relaxed time of year to catch up on those annoying little jobs that have accumulated over the past three years, like writing your dissertation. So I thought I’d have a look around for a bit of advice for all you poor fools. Hayley at Words of Science offers some advice on good words to use in a thesis – particularly useful when Microsoft Office built-in-thesaurus just doesn’t cut the mustard. Combine this with the list of commonly used opening sentences from Lucy at Always Listen to your Pig Puppet and you’ve basically got half your diss written! And because for some reason it is always harder to stay focused on writing during the summer (see cartoon above) Jim gives a handy summary of a useful time tracking app for all you mac users out there (he also managed to find the time to have a baby recently, congrats buddy!).
Then there is the recurring theme ever present in this carnival: woe stories from people who are actually in the midst of writing their dissertations, or thinking about writing, or furiously trying to get enough data so one can start thinking about writing. I like reading these because it’s always nice to know that someone else is suffering along with you. Whether you’re thinking about starting writing like Anastasia, or coming to the sad realisation that working from home is entirely unproductive like PsycGirl, we feel your pain. And it’s this frustration that leads to the perpetual state of existential self-reflection we all live in, about why on earth we even chose grad school at all, as articulated here by FrogPrincess. Though some manage to surpass all this frustration and occupy their summer months when they should be writing by doing other things like getting married. Way to procrastinate ZaPaper!
Of course grad school doesn’t last forever (though it damn well feels like it does!!!), and for a lucky few summer brings about the terrifying thought of graduating and moving into the real world (gasp!). FemaleCSGradStudent shares the rollercoaster ride of emotion that is leaving grad school, while Breena at Who Doesn’t Love Roses? gives us her take on what life is like for the freshly graduated. Once you’ve been out of grad school for a while though, the reality of finding an academic job can hit quite hard, as StyleyGeek found out here.
Others may be spending the summer trying to clock up some teaching experience at summer school. For many, teaching a class can be a tremendous time-sucking bastard of a job, but Joel Corbo, a physics grad student at UC Berkley, explains in an excellent guest post for Cosmic Variance that it is actually key to a well rounded graduate education.
For me, however, working over the summer always involves an unhealthy amount of time spent on mindless web-surfing, facebook stalking and general internet-procrastination. In that spirit, History Enthusiast shares a gem of a music video about being a grad student, while I get my kicks out of watching geeky and lame viral science music videos about pipetting.
There you have it folks. Enjoy what’s left of the summer before all those snot-nosed undergrads move back to campus.
