Post Punk Kitchen Forum

This is like one of the 12 phases of grad student life: distract yourself with anti-distraction tools. I tried and failed (or succeeded, depending on how you define failure) but I think the deck was stacked against me: I do Internet research; i.e., I research the Internetssssss. It's kinda hard to study AND block the tubes at the same time.

haha, probably true. But I did successfully list the PPK and LJ and FB and all that as -2 points distracting so now I can at least gauge how much time I spend on that versus how much time I spend in Word. I also spent like an hour plus just messing with the software, but it has kindly decided that playing with the software is +2 productive! hah!

For those of you considering grad school, here's a beautiful infographic that you should never, ever look at:

http://visual.ly/long-and-winding-road-phd

So… has anyone else completely lost the ability to cook/feed themselves since starting grad school?

So it turns out I'm only getting like 4 hours of work done a day. um, what the fizzle do I do all day! I realize that even if I was in an office I'm sure I wouldn't actually be spending 8 hours on work once you subtract slacking and ppk and stuff, but four!? siiiigh. And yes, P-J, I do spend some of that time feeding myself! So I guess it's not all bad?

Nope. I'm emotionally eating up a storm!

What conference and where are your in/externship interviews?? (PM me if you don't want to share all of that publicly). Congrats!

Hah. Me too. Plans for today: Baking a cake or cupcakes (chocolate??), then finishing another abstract before the evil deadline overtakes me.

I am so stressed out my damn qualitative data collection. I need around 30 interviews (at least that's the goal) and I've got 7 right now, and 3 more scheduled. But I keep getting ignored and have gotten some Nos from interview subjects. I mean I should have known this was going to be a challenge, and I'm sure it'll still be OK.... but it's so frustrating. I mean don't you see how important my awesome research is?! How could you say no?! On the bright side, there's a clear pattern in who is saying no, so that's a finding in of itself I guess.

My sympathies! I am worried about this as well, as I'm about to release my web survey and start recruiting interviewees from my population of interest. I have been doing some field work so I have met some of these people so I hope that helps me, but I know I'll be in your shoes soon.

P.s. when I originally saw this post I had just had a convo with someone in my program who was patting themselves on the back for working for almost 4 whole hours and more recently has lamented the number (zero) of job talk invitations. Some people...

Good luck to you! I thought my topic would be something these people wanted to talk about, but turns out some of them really don't. Scheduled one more though at least. The worst part is I have a trip to Toronto to do data collection planned for the week after next and I only have two interviews scheduled there right now. I feel like I need at least four for it to be worthwhile.

And yeah, four hours isn't bad, but it leaves something to be desired! I finally got cracking on my methods section at least and I plan to have an awesome section on reflexivity if nothing else.

Habitat modeling is HARD.

I felt guilty for only doing about 4 hours of work today, but then I remembered I graded for about 3 hours this morning. So, if I go read for an hour before bed, I'll have put in a full 8! Sometimes I wish I went to a fancy school where they fund you without making you teach. However, after sitting through a couple of awful job talks in the past two weeks, I am starting to think that the teaching experience is worth as much as my own research.

I know plenty of people who probably don't spend even 4 hours a day working. Many of these people have been working on their dissertations for an excess of three years at this point with no end in sight. I no longer find their facebook updates hoping that today they'll catch a ride on the "dissertation train" entertaining.

So is this also the place to whine about SPSS? I've spent several hours today with it on a very simple homework assignment. I loved the pre-grad school days back when I felt smart. I think I've felt very dumb every day since embarking on this grad school quest.

Yes. Concordantly, it's also the place to convert people to R.

I guess I checked into the wrong thread because I had to just google "SPSS"

Not necessarily, I'm sure there are plenty of majors that don't need stats and many others that use a different software program.

A different software package like R!

Yes, much faster than something with a GUI once you get past the impenetrable documentation (why are substitute and eval not in the manual and hidden in the language definition instead). Maybe that's not so much of an issue if you're not writing your own functions though. http://www.r-project.org/

I last touched SPSS a good four years ago, but it was definitely clunky for what I was doing. My whole analysis would have been much quicker if I'd automated a lot of reading in data, fitting a regression line, getting out the equation, transforming data, getting stats, transforming back, etc. in R. But then I think anyone handling large sets of data would benefit from learning some basic programming skills anyway.

I would love to be converted but I have no choice for now--the class I'm in is 100% SPSS focused and so I'm stuck with it. If I decide to change course and go the thesis route I'll certainly check into R!

eta: the bit about the last good package being 4 years ago seems in line with what my professor said. And he hasn't updated his version for that reason.

Sorry about the delay. Its been crazzzzy over here. I am going to the Society for humanistic psychology (Division 32) conference in pittsburgh, and I got an interview at Madden MHC. Have you heard anything about them? They are out in Hines, right above the Loyola campus, and there were five cemeteries on my walk over there from the blue line!

How has quitting your job gone? Has it freed up enough time for you enjoy yourself/get your work done?

Hugs!

The only reason I ever used it was that it was installed on the computers where I worked at the time. People used Excel to normalize and fit linear models there *shudder*.

We're hanging in there (so far), but that's largely because because I use cooking as a procrastination technique, and my partner (who's also an academic; albeit one with tenure) is happy to split the shopping/meal prep. In prefect truth, he's done at least as much of the kitchen duty as me since I started this program, for which I am enormously grateful.

Yes. I do all sorts of meal planning, but all I ever want is pizza and take out Chinese.

I do bake when I get especially stressed out, however.


My brain hurts.

Agreed. I'm feeling this pain right now. Not that I don't have basic programming skills, but I just haven't used them in a while. And I suppose the SPSS versus R debate is different when you're establishing skills with a tool that you intend to use for a career, in which case R should be the way to go, right?