It’s been a while! I think it’s somewhat appropriate that my last post was about the stress of PhD work. Life pretty much went down the toilet since I wrote that. Briefly: genetics work failed, my father died, we shifted into a new research building, we had two massive earthquakes, I got depressed, PhD work was non-existent.
That said life is pretty good right now. I’ve finally got some perspective to look back on the past year and think that I might have some things to say that could be useful to other people. There’s been a lot of pain and self-growth in the past year; it’s easy to forget the progress.
So I’m coming back to this blog for two reasons. First, to share some of the hurdles and lessons relating primarily to the PhD. Second, because I need focus and accountability. It’s easy to let entire weeks go by where very little gets done, so I had the idea to write here weekly updating on PhD work. We’ll see how I go…
But first, a state of the union. Though I say I haven’t been working on my thesis, actually I have got some stuff done. Almost all of chapter one is written, plus a few sections for other chapters. I’m still struggling with the genetics work I spoke about last time, but I’ve doubled the number of loci I’m working on and will have an idea soon what I can use them for. Analysis takes me forever and I keep getting sidetracked, so at some point I have to set myself some goals to just finish the damn stats.
Wish me luck!
Thesis word count: 15,400
