Conquering the Grad-life Hydra

The Hydra Torch

You just graduated. You feel great. Excited. Powerful. Like Hercules. Then, you set out on a challenge. You unwittingly decide to be a graduate student. Much like how Hercules went on a challenge to slay the Hydra. You swiftly tend to your classes, just as Hercules swiftly cut off the Hydra's head with a stroke of his sword. Unfortunately for Hercules, and for you, the challenge doesn't end there. In place of the severed head grows a multitude of other heads. These come in the form of a new job, your duties as a member of a laboratory group, your research, etc. What you and Hercules need are a new Hydra-fighting-tool-thing. A torch. This represents your brand-new redesigned productivity system, because the old one that you relied on just for school probably isn’t enough anymore. In fact, you probably weren’t thinking about productivity systems, since all you had to do was follow the highly structured education system: listen to your professor, do your homework, (cram) study for your exams.

There are many articles and videos online about different productivity systems, so this post is going to focus on helping you set up the best configuration for your workflow. This way you’ll have a clear image of the big picture while you experiment with different components of your system. Believe me, it’s probably easier this way instead of trying to find a solution when the problem is already threatening a certain aspect of your life. This blog will probably have follow-up posts tackling how you can use individual components at greater depth.

 

What's it for?

Before you start designing your productivity system, you first ought to realize what it's for. It's important to keep in mind what you need your productivity system to do for you while you explore its many different aspects. I think a good way to think about it is as a set of tools, that allow you to emulate the kind of structure to your life that you’re used to. The thing is, no one’s going to tell you what to do anymore. They’re just going to tell you what they want from you by a certain deadline. Your productivity system will help you organize your thoughts such that you can deal with them at the time you allot for them.

Is it possible to write a scientific paper manuscript...in a weekend???

Is it? 

Hi! I'm gonna go ahead and say that for us, it probably isn't. Not yet. But I got the idea for this post when I saw a video on YouTube which is literally entitled "How to Write a Paper in a Weekend (By Prof. Pete Carr)". Professor Carr is a relatively old man and I do not doubt for a second that he can write a paper in a weekend (he actually stated that he was involved in writing around 400 papers). So this post is going to be mainly a synthesis of what he said and my own reactions to his advice, based on my own experiences.

First he laid down some preliminary requirements for this type of activity. Of course, you can't actually write a paper from scratch, without anything to build on. However, I still think that even if you are in the early stages of your research project, you can start following his algorithm.

Organizing your digital files as a geoscientist

Hi everyone! If you're stuck in quarantine like we are now in April 2020 because of the COVID19 disease, or for some other reason, now might be the perfect time to re-organize your digital file system. 

About a week after I graduated, I applied for my first job, and about two weeks after that, I reported to work. During that month of inactivity, I didn't switch to a new file system, so throughout my first year of work, I was mostly creating new folders on-the-fly. This, of course, lead to a very messy file system! At some point in the middle of my second year, I just had to do something about it.

This begs the question, "what is a file system for?" Well, in its simplest form, it's to allow you to find something easily. If you have a small number of files, you don't really need one. That's why I survived for a while without one. But, as a working geoscience grad student, you'll know that we eventually end up with a ton of files, involved in many different aspects of our lives.