Tuesday 7 June 2011

Another milestone

I have finally submitted my 'draft' paper for the CIBSE Technical Symbosium in September!

Of course it did take me the whole of last month to find the data, analyse it, and write the paper as a whole. Something I learned from 'core skills training' within my company is to review the performance during each project as soon as it finishes.
Therefore:
I will have to give it to me, I have been more organised than usual. I even managed to send my draft for review to my supervisors on Wednesday!
But even though I had a draft by last Wednesday, I stayed up all night last night to finish it. There are various reasons for that. Firstly I did not finalize my graphs over the weekend as I was supposed to, and I did not write the conclusion early enough. Also I hadn't checked the required formatting for the references thoroughly, and I was using the wrong one from the beginning.
These, on top with the fact that one of my supervisors only sent me his comments through at 2 o clock yesterday, requesting major changes in the results section, caused major trouble!

As a general conclusion I think that I have improved.
But I need to organise myself a lot better in order to manage my project more effectively.
For example I could have sent my draft earlier to my supervisors so that they could find the time to review it, in between their busy schedules.
While waiting for their responses I could have finalized my version of it, with good quality graphs and a template for the whole paper. This would have helped me save time when making the requested changes.
One of the reasons why my version was not finalized, was mainly because of my stress, keeping me from working effectively. Last week I spent 4 days at home, supposedly writing, but I was not really making any progress. I really need to find a way to avoid this happening in the future!

How I will follow this up? I will try to work in tighter schedules, so that for the next deadline, I do send my draft to my supervisors at least a week before the deadline. This will help all of us in creating a better result, and hopefully keep my stress levels under control!


Have a great week!

The Physicist



3 comments:

  1. Writing a scientific paper is tough and it's the part of the job I don't enjoy doing. Of course I am thrilled when I then get to see my papers published and showing up online in their cute little format, but writing them is what I hate the most. No matter how many times you revise them, they will always need revision. We are about to submit one for over a week now and still revising! Just writing the letter to the editor of the journal took a week! But I would change the joy of seeing the finalized work with anything! Good luck in everything! :)

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  2. :) Mine was a conference paper, and therefore had a deadline, otherwise, I would still be revising!!
    I hope it gets through peer review :D

    Good luck to you too!! And Happy Birthday for last week :)

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  3. We submitted the paper yesterday finally! Good luck to us both & thanks for the wishes! :)

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