Home on a Saturday night. * insert contented sigh here *
The last two weeks have been all kinds of hectic. Consequently, my body and mind are eternally grateful for this break from the madness, thank you very much. The calendar screen grab I posted last Sunday was, regrettably, accurate to how my week actually turned out. I was barely able to find time to breathe between teaching commitments, helping out an Honours student with data collection, teaching, meetings, karate, teaching, and work. And the PhD, you ask? To you sir, I say “What PhD?!” (Which is to say, I pushed my research forward by zero arbitrary research development units this week. What PhD, indeed…)
Of course, I have paid for my insolence by waking up exhausted after two 2-hour naps today. The wurst.
Still, I remain grateful and excited about my PhD. It’s been 4.5 months since I started, and while I’m not where I thought I would be by now, I think things are still tracking well. Ethics approval has finally come through from my university, so we can press ahead to data retrieval and data analysis. I embraced my nerd-dom long ago, so I have no reservations in saying that this is easily the most exciting part of research. As a biomechanist-in-training, I am a data fiend. However, it can be a tenuous relationship; ask me sometime about prepping triaxial acceleration data from two measures for 500+ movement trials. Yeah. That said, working with data is still the best part of it all - it’s where the findings wait to be found, sneaky and hidden. And when they’re discovered, there’s that brief sense of a pioneer, of seeing new land on the horizon, of seeing something no one has ever seen or thought to measure.
Later, you delve into the literature, buoyed by your groundbreaking findings, only to discover that it’s all been done. Back in 1996, even. Devo*. (This has never happened to me, clearly.) Nonetheless, that “land ho!” moment, though fleeting, is one to savour.
But enough rhapsodising. Saturday night is for make-shift cubby houses, a beanbag, and The Little Stevies on my iPod.
Hope you’re having a grand weekend :)
* For the non-Australians following my blog, “devo” = devastated. Not the band.