Thursday, August 23, 2007

Corrections

I am, no surprise, writing my book and editing my poster and talk. The book because the poster and talk are bumming me out and I'm nearly finished drafting the book chapters! I have maybe 3 left to write before I start to edit and see if anything makes sense.

I spent 80 minutes or so presenting the poster and talk to my group while they ate pizza and ripped all that I know to shreds. I was a sad plankton and due to Friend's penchant for SpongeBob, I told her today that I belonged in a crabby patty where I couldn't hurt anyone with my mistaken belief that I can actually do science.

"Has the poster been printed yet?" Someone asked after everyone had viewed its projection on the large screen for a moment.

"Nope." I said. "If you see anything that needs to be changed, go ahead." I turned over the sheet of paper - the first of 3 that I'd use - after 15 minutes of 'change this,' 'that's not right,' 'that sounds weird,' and 'that looks funny.' It's not even that big a poster! I can't remember anything that those feeder fish left alone!

It took 30 minutes and 3 tries for me to close that window. Then I started on my talk - 12 slides. I think the first 2 made it without being attacked. Maybe my group was tired after the poster? But the rest of the talk was summarily critiqued as I wrote down corrections as fast as I could take notes. I'm re-doing nearly all the figures. And text. And legends. It turns out that the slides I'd spent weeks making were, how shall I say it, not so good.

So I'm busy doing that as well as summarizing into pseudo-fictional chapters my decent into depression. It's super fun.

But it is nearly complete. So there's hope that tomorrow will be better.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

good luck with all that work!

Cee said...

Oh, poor plankton! That sounds like a dreadful experience. Hope tomorrow's an improvement.

Non Tenured Assistant Professor said...

Keep going. Everything will be alright, sometimes it just feels like a marathon...

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