| Gemstone |
[Mar. 1st, 2006|04:08 am] |
Gemstone. A four year, interdisciplinary research project, in which you work together with your team and a faculty mentor to create a book-length thesis paper. It was not quite as advertised, but it's certainly not been boring.
We're on the verge of finishing our rough draft to go to our discussants for the thesis conference in April. Everytime I try to explain this to someone, they get a baffled expression on their face, and I remember that the gemstone staff seem to be the only people that have ever actually used the word "discussant".
In any case, my two main sections are sent in, and with any luck, we'll hit the 150 page required raw pagecount. I've been mostly preoccupied with getting our paper written for the past few weeks, often at the expense of my coursework, so this is going to be a great weight off of my shoulders once we get the final copy sent in. I've been spending a lot of time thinking, trying to figure out what to write. I've been having trouble writing portions of it, because it seems we're constantly having to redefine our project. Many times, I'll spend hours working, and end up with a half-page per hour or less.
This is not a very good position to be in -- I probably shouldn't have signed up to write the discussion and analysis section before it was clear that we would actually have quantitative results. Personally, I'm really not able to start writing until I have a clear idea of what I want to say. I could have hammered out my section in a few days, had I had all of our results ready. Things are especially hard because I had shared responsibilities for part of the project with a team member who dropped gemstone at the beginning of the semester.
Looking back, I have to say, it's been... interesting.
( Read more... )
I haven't turned in my last two neural networks homeworks, and I missed today's artificial intellegence homework, which neither I nor ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tadrinth knew about. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
As an aside, I have absolutely no idea how it got to be March so soon...
Three months from now, I'll have an engineering degree.
Four months from now, I'll be married to the most amazing girl I've ever met.
Right now it is time to sleep, and I will sleep abundantly. |
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