I’m back on a weekly schedule, and loving having a bit more consistency. The students at my university are on Fall Break for Columbus Day, but I am working through it. Don’t worry, I took my break on Friday. This is just the price I pay for taking my day off a little bit early.
Projects The C-SPAN conference was amazing during the last week. I met Angela Garcia there, which was really cool.
So these have started to feel more like a monthly roundup rather than a weekly one, but I’m honestly happy as long as I’m fighting the good fight. My students are settled in, fall is in the air, and the kids are thinking about Halloween now. The federal government even managed to get a budget through without shutting down, so I’m feeling pretty good.
Projects I am presenting my C-SPAN research at conference next week.
The month of August just flew by between preparation for and the beginning of the first semester. My students are getting ready to give their first presentation next week, and I am starting to get into the swing of a routine. I enjoyed labor day weekend, and managed to make some significant progress around settling into the new residence, so that has done a lot for my peace of mind.
I haven’t done as much work on my dissertation over the summer up until this point as I had hoped that I would, and I’m glad. I needed some time to decompress and it has been hard to focus on work when so many more important social changes are coursing through the country. It is hard to focus on the importance of my small corner of academia when so many innocent (or at least not sufficiently guilty) people are being literally shot in the streets.
The research team recorded an entire week’s worth of class meetings of three courses at four times during the course of the semester. These class meetings were recorded in video from four different angles. This resulted in a very large amount of data (approximately 200 hours of raw video) requiring about 1 Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of storage space. The audio portion of the video was also rendered out and compressed into MP3 format files for ease of use and analysis when research questions can be answered without video.
My adviser tells me that I am a “systems thinker.” She isn’t the first one to notice this – I know that she is right. I am constantly trying to optimize and improve the systems I use in my daily life. I notice when things aren’t working, and I obsess over often think about ways to improve those processes. In fact, this can be quite a bit of a burden, because it means that I am constantly exposed to one of my greatest temptations to procrastination, and it quickly becomes self-reinforcing: