U.S.: Grad School
As I embarked on this journey called grad school a year and four months ago, a roommate of mine from undergrad told me that it was going to require a lot of patience. I never quite understood that fully, until this semester.
Patience is necessary for the times when the list of things to do will require more than 48 collective hours, and you realize that you cannot accomplish it all in one sitting. During those estimated 48 hours one needs to do other things such as eat, exercise, entertain a kitty, etc. Sleep is also necessary. This semester I learned to tell myself to be happy with small accomplishments because big projects are not tackled all in one sitting, but rather one step at a time. Sometimes setting smaller, achievable goals is better and more productive in the long run than setting an unreasonable goal and expecting to reach it the first time. In grad school, examples of this could be:
Unreasonable goal: I'm going to read all 14 sources for my literature review, summarize them, and finish my 25-page paper in one weekend.
Attainable goal: This weekend I'm going to read 3 articles, summarize them, and think about the way I will incorporate them into my own research. I will do this every weekend until I have enough substance to continue with my own writing.
Feeling a sense of accomplishment, even ever-so-slightly, is much better than drowning in an endless to-do list. In a world where said to-do list seems only to ever get longer and never shorter, patience is vital in recognizing that not everything will be accomplished at once. And that is okay.
I have finished an exam in Golden Age literature, turned in a 30-page paper on morphosyntactic variation, am now one submission of a 25-page paper on the r-sound in Spanish away from the end of the semester (plus grading my students' final exam after they take it tomorrow afternoon...yes, a Saturday afternoon...in the middle of a snowstorm...) and one semester away from a Master's degree. The list of things to do (or should I say, study) will continue, especially with Master's exams coming up in April. For the time being, however, I am going to take a (deserved) break from school and from the cold and head to the southern hemisphere for a few weeks. Perhaps ending the semester with such a trip did not make surviving the test of patience any easier, but what matters is that I survived it and it is (almost) time to celebrate.
Patience is necessary for the times when the list of things to do will require more than 48 collective hours, and you realize that you cannot accomplish it all in one sitting. During those estimated 48 hours one needs to do other things such as eat, exercise, entertain a kitty, etc. Sleep is also necessary. This semester I learned to tell myself to be happy with small accomplishments because big projects are not tackled all in one sitting, but rather one step at a time. Sometimes setting smaller, achievable goals is better and more productive in the long run than setting an unreasonable goal and expecting to reach it the first time. In grad school, examples of this could be:
Unreasonable goal: I'm going to read all 14 sources for my literature review, summarize them, and finish my 25-page paper in one weekend.
Attainable goal: This weekend I'm going to read 3 articles, summarize them, and think about the way I will incorporate them into my own research. I will do this every weekend until I have enough substance to continue with my own writing.
Feeling a sense of accomplishment, even ever-so-slightly, is much better than drowning in an endless to-do list. In a world where said to-do list seems only to ever get longer and never shorter, patience is vital in recognizing that not everything will be accomplished at once. And that is okay.
I have finished an exam in Golden Age literature, turned in a 30-page paper on morphosyntactic variation, am now one submission of a 25-page paper on the r-sound in Spanish away from the end of the semester (plus grading my students' final exam after they take it tomorrow afternoon...yes, a Saturday afternoon...in the middle of a snowstorm...) and one semester away from a Master's degree. The list of things to do (or should I say, study) will continue, especially with Master's exams coming up in April. For the time being, however, I am going to take a (deserved) break from school and from the cold and head to the southern hemisphere for a few weeks. Perhaps ending the semester with such a trip did not make surviving the test of patience any easier, but what matters is that I survived it and it is (almost) time to celebrate.
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