(Sometimes Not)Research Article-ing

As the rest of my fellow 109 peers breathe a sigh of hopefully relief, not despair, at the passage of the deadline for the research article, now would be a better-late-than-never entry for the blog. I have spent much of the last week and weekend writing, agonizing, finalizing, sometimes bitterly cursing(shhh) and anxiously editing my research article. I think the research article was hyped to me as the toughest assignment in 109 by friends who have taken the class before leading me to enter the writing process with lots of apprehension. For what it’s worth and perhaps prematurely, I will tentatively claim that it didn’t go as bad as I expected. Perhaps I went in with extremely low expectations for the easiness or perhaps I am highly mistaken about my writing quality, but I think the article went as well as I could’ve asked. The change to having a defined list and orders of figures definitely eliminated a lot of the choosing dilemmas I would otherwise have. Although sometimes this led to some unnatural bending of the story to fit this order and sometimes general confusion over why the data exists like this and why to present it in this manner, the predetermined figures helped me ask more pointed and focused questions. I can’t in good conscience say I felt like it was a breeze, because my discussion section felt somewhat like the MacGregor wind tunnel with plenty of wincing as I wrote and erased and generally felt confused. But at the end of the day we made it through. 

However during that week/weekend, I also did plenty of not research article writing that helped keep me marginally sane throughout. (I wouldn’t place my sanity much higher than marginal in these trying times :P)
  • Ping pong in my basement, trying to not get demolished by my little brother
  • Stared at my friend’s pictures of their two adorable cats, Smoky and Dusty
  • Attended several CP* events for my two clubs and talked with a bunch of excitable prefrosh, squeeee they’re adorable
  • Tutored my student for CovED, which is an education initiative started by MIT students, exciting. I brushed up on my 5th grade level writing skills just in time for tutoring and the research article, just kidding >-<
  • Stalked the news a little bit, and hovered around the Worldometers chart, distressed by the steadily climbing #s
  • Baked a lemon bar and some Japanese Cheesecake. Baked goods are the new black lmao
  • Forced my little brother to “peer-edit” my research article, this lasted for about 7 minutes :(
  • Feeding my pet guppy for excessive periods to be responsibly procrastinating
  • Held a birthday car procession for one of my high school friends. This involved pulling over in the middle of the road to retape my poster oops 
  • Other vaguely fun, trivial, distracting, rambunctious things

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