Hello everyone, I hope you don't mind but I'm creating my own diary thread!

I'm hoping it will give me a chance to record my progress both daily and over a period of time to track the roller coaster of emotions that is a PhD. I also want to record my daily aims, in the hope that I will stop procrastinating and actually get some work done!

About me: am female, 22, based near London, undergraduate degree in stats, and now doing a PhD in stats, and by the way billy isn't my real name!

So, for those that are interested read on, if not please ignore this thread!

xx

Go Billy--will enjoy reading your progress and aims! Post away!

Thursday 14.08.08

Am liking this new style forum and the fact that I can now do underlined and bold writing. Todays work is to make some edits to a training paper I have been writing since day one of my PhD. It has been through several reincarnations as the data has never seemed to work, so am now working with a simulated dataset, which means that once we submit the reviewers might say that it needs a real dataset. Which is hard to do when your trying to demonstrate something in statistics. Save to say it is particularily boring and I will report back later with my progress...

Forgot to add above that I am in my first year and due to upgrade in nov. Also I hope that this diary will provide prospective students or other first year students some inspiration!

Hi Billy,

Good luck with the transfer on November and with the PhD in general. Keep posting, and if you need anything just ask away. We might be able to give some advice.

:-)

14.08.08

Right a quick update- managed to get quite a lot of the changes, but not completely finished. Have printed off a copy for the train ride home (1 hour). Am off home early tonight, as I have volunteered to cook dinner...we are moving house in 3 weeks and the parents-in-law are so stressed I thought I would give MIL a night off from cooking! (She never normally lets me)!

Good luck Billy!!!! that's great you taking iniative and tracking your daily progress!!

I am doing that also, i have a time journal. i have to record what i have done on an hourly basis! kinda has helped me to stay motivated. because when the egg timer goes off, i don't want to log in and write "erm did nothing". lol

i look forward to reading your daily progress! we're all with you!

Friday 15.08.08

Woooo!!! It's friday8-)- my fav day of the week because tomorrow I will get a lay in and not have to get up at 6.30 :-x! Not a very sucessful day yesterday...i took some reading for the train but didn't do it and thinking I would do it this morning on the way in. But I didn't ... (down)very naughty of me, ... am going to read through now after posting.

Todays Aims:
1. Read through yet another draft of paper, and finish of changes. Look at data again and make some more tables.
2. Work out how to put references into LaTeX- need to find out how to use BibTeX.
3. Start on the masses of programming that I have to do (my favourite part of my PhD ):$

Will report back later!

There is a LaTeX support group here if you are intereted:

http://www.phdcomics.com/proceedings/viewtopic.php?t=194&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

15.08.08

So....on the aims I managed to finish the pape (woo hoo) but it took much longer than expected, so I only managed to start working out how to do the BibTeX stuff for my lit review. Am hoping to look a bit more into this on the train on the way home. Will take some programming home for the weekend, but don't know if I will get much work done. Am so pleased I managed to get the changes to the paper done quickly (well, for me) so that i can move onto more interesting things. Has been a slow week for me work wise, but am hoping things will pick up next week.

Am moving house in 3 weeks (eek!) and so have to start packing at some point...so that will be this weekends fun! Anyways, have a great weekend everyone! And thanks to all those who have posted with encouragement!

======= Date Modified 18 Aug 2008 14:58:39 =======
the edit function is not working. otherwise would have added this to my message below

but
how do you give people stars? test