Well, it is that time of the month, so to speak. We return for another end of the month research update where I tell you guys what research I have completed, am close to completing, or attempted to complete and ended up with me resorting to question my work stature and ability haha. All jokes aside though, I am quite pleased with my November research update.
This month I had two major goals: (1) submit a revised draft of my third research chapter and (2) submit a first draft of my second research chapter. As of November 30th, around 9 pm EST, I sent off a revised draft to my supervisors. I hope to get the revisions soon so I can keep on improving the manuscript and resubmit it for publication to the Geological Society of America Geology journal. The first draft of my second research chapter is a week behind schedule, but I plan to have it sent to my supervisors by Sunday, December 6th at the latest. I pretty much have most of the text written out, I only need to finish the ending of the discussion section and write my conclusion and abstract. I also need to make a couple more figures for the draft because as of now, I only have four official figures for it. These drafts and comments for the next drafts will keep me busy during the month of December and into the start of the New Year.
On November 19th, I had my annual committee meeting where I presented a summary of the work I completed during the year 2019-2020 and plan to complete from now until I defend in August 2021.The meeting went well and my entire committee says I am on track to finish on time. They did mention I had given myself a lot of time to write my introduction and conclusion chapter for my thesis. I said I would start writing my introduction chapter in January and would be finished by March, and I would start writing my conclusion chapter in February and finish by April. They pretty much said most students write these chapters out in a couple of weeks so I should dedicate more time to completing my two research manuscripts that need to be published next year. I do have a couple of side-projects in the pipeline so I may start to use that time to work on them a bit more and inch them closer to a possible paper writing stage.
If you read my mid-November research update post you will know I had some research proposal assignments to mark for the Earth Science Graduate Seminar course I am TAing this year. A couple of days ago, I finished marking the last of the proposals and the students now have their marks. It was difficult marking some of the assignments because it was hard to decide how many marks some sections should be awarded. Some sections contained all of the content needed for a research proposal but required some grammatical correction, while others were beautifully written but excluded key information that is vital for a research proposal. I won't give any examples because I do not want to quote work that the students have submitted for the course. I definitely found marking these research proposals to be a learning curve for me, as I had to decide which assignment would stand as a great research proposal, a good research proposal, and a fair research proposal. None of the proposals I marked were bad, some just required some reformatting and condensing of text to remove jargon language and unnecessary information.
This is pretty much everything I had to report for this monthly research update post. December will consist mainly of more paper writing and a second round of TA research proposal marking. I may receive a response about a postdoc research position I applied for in Europe, but there is still the chance I may not hear anything until after the new year.
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Until my mid-December update, see you guys next time!
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