Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Onwards, PhD!

Welcome again ladies and gentlemen to this blog!

You may have noticed the blogs have been coming fortnightly rather than weekly. This is mainly because I've had a fair chunk of work to do and writing a blog at the end of a day is slightly less appealing than going home, having a hot strong cup of tea and a dose of Gaming Therapy. Hence, fortnightly posts. Hope you don't mind too much :)

So, what's been happening? More of the stats stuff that I mentioned in my last blogpost. In fact, that's pretty much been my life for the past little while. Alas this isn't entirely the fun stuff, this is the rather painful monotonous stuff. It's taken me what feels like an age; it's one of those tasks that you just know will take forever the first time you do it, but when you do it for the second/third/etc time you'll kick yourself that it ever took any time at all, first time round.

As always, there are silver linings, some thinner than others. I have discovered a new genre of music that I rather like, I have listened to a number of podcasts, not to mention the truly heroic speed with which I seem to type and the skills in SPSS and Excel that I had to teach myself while doing these tasks.

So really, the stuff I learned is the prize of these tasks. I can do some pretty fancy shenanigans in SPSS and Excel now; I have slowly honed my work ethic for long tiring tasks, and so forth. And really, these things are just as the (perhaps more vaunted) skills such as concise writing, public speaking skills and so forth that a PhD requires on the surface. I have no doubt that they'll be of use for a long time to come.

See you next fortnight!

No comments:

Post a Comment