Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I have been getting super slack this week as it's now the third week my supervisor has been away and I haven't got any materials at the moment to do any experiments (I need to wait for the boss to return from holiday and authorise my purchases so I can actually get the stuff I need to make up new samples). Anyway I've been ticking over OK the past couple of weeks brushing up on my maths, checking over the literature, going over data and reanalysing it but I feel I've got as far as I can with that and am flagging a bit this week. Anyhow today I've just started writing another paper (even though I don't have the key experiments done yet!) and I'm excited at how much easier it is. It took me flipping ages to write my first paper on this project partly because I was generally a bit depressed and finding it hard to do anything, and also because it was a lot of reading around the literature and trying to tie my new results in with the current information out there. Anyway this new paper is a direct follow on so I can pretty much rehash most of the introduction and all the methods in this new paper then plug in my new results and discussion.
I didn't realise how much I have learnt so far in this post doc until now I think as everything has been quite hard but now I really feel like I get it and have ideas of my own. My next big personal challenge is chatting with my boss when he gets back from holiday about the ideas I have come up with and whether any of them are actually worth pursuing. This is quite a big deal for me as I hate saying what I think to bosses/people in authority, I have the terrible habit of talking myself out of things, which when it gets really bad I talk myself out of trying anything and end up feeling miserable, depressed and unproductive. It's all a (probably unfounded) fear of looking stupid and being ridiculed for being stupid or not properly understanding something.
I didn't realise how much I have learnt so far in this post doc until now I think as everything has been quite hard but now I really feel like I get it and have ideas of my own. My next big personal challenge is chatting with my boss when he gets back from holiday about the ideas I have come up with and whether any of them are actually worth pursuing. This is quite a big deal for me as I hate saying what I think to bosses/people in authority, I have the terrible habit of talking myself out of things, which when it gets really bad I talk myself out of trying anything and end up feeling miserable, depressed and unproductive. It's all a (probably unfounded) fear of looking stupid and being ridiculed for being stupid or not properly understanding something.
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