Hello everyone!
This is just a very short post updating you guys about my research in January 2020. I will be posting these research update blogs monthly. I will summarize what work I have completed, my plans for the rest of the month and next month, and any travel plans for conferences and workshops.
This month I gave myself a personal deadline to complete the first draft of my second manuscript. Normally I work on my manuscripts a little bit each week, but I discovered near the end of 2019 that it was not very productive and I ended up losing motivation to write. Jumping back and worth, and working on the manuscript for a couple hours at a time really did not help me. I struggled to write some paragraphs and stick to a writing schedule. This year, I have decided to take a different approach and dedicate entire days to just working on writing my manuscript. To do this, I will isolate myself from distractions on the internet, which includes social media such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. My phone will be put on silent and stored in my bag. I will only look at my phone during my lunch break (I will have to give some people a heads up when I dedicate days to writing, just so they don't become alarmed if they don't hear anything from me for a few hours :D ). I know I will be more motivate to write if I isolate myself from distractions and dedicate whole days to writing. This will help me reach my personal deadline, which is to have a first draft ready before the 30th of January. The reason I set the 30th of January as my personal deadline is because I booked an appointment at the Writing and Support Center at Western University. The Writing and Support Center has helped me before on improving my writing structure, make the story easy to follow from paragraph to paragraph, and ensure I am not going off on any tangents in my introduction and discussion sections. If you are an undergraduate or graduate student reading this post I highly recommend visiting the writing support center at your host institution. There is nothing wrong with asking for help to check or improve your writing.
Over the past few months, I have been attending Own Your Future - Professional Development Programs hosted by the School of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies at Western University. The program is designed to offer workshops for PhD students and postdocs to improve their research, communication and networking abilities. I have attended three workshops so far and have already registered for more until April 2020. The first workshop I attended was "Using the Power Skills Assessment to Guide Your Skill Development". The workshop taught me about my strengths and weaknesses in academic writing and communication, and how I should acknowledge them and learn to improve them. The second workshop I attended was "Making the Most of the Writing Process: Knocking Down the WALS". I found this workshop to be extremely useful for planning and writing my PhD thesis. I was taught what normally stops people from writing about their thesis or what triggers writing blocks. How to write outlines that helped breakdown what we really needed for our thesis was also introduced, which I found very insightful! I already knew that writing outlines was more constructive than writing without a plan, but I always struggled to find the best way to write one. The recent workshop I attended was "LinkedIn: I've Signed up - Now What?". As the name suggests, I learned how to use LinkedIn more efficiently to network and connect with professionals in science fields I am interested in or considering for as a career. The workshop is a bit explanitory, however I will say that if you want to find connections quickly, you should look at the alumni list on your host institutions LinkedIn page. You can see what careers past graduate students have taken, and where they are correctly working. You might a common connection with someone, and saying you are studying at the university or college they graduated from can give you an advantage to talk with them over LinkedIn.
If you are interested in Own Your Future workshops, click on the link here: https://uwo.ca/ownyourfuture/
That is really all I have for you guys at the moment. I have been working on some radar processing and zircon crystallography work, but I do not want to share anything on that work yet. I have some plans in the works and want to talk about those plans and my work at the same time :)
Until next time, see you all soon!
To learn more about my research and know when I release new blog posts, follow me on Twitter at @GavinOnTheMoon, or visit my website https://gavintolometti.wixsite.com/gavinonthemoon.