A Weekend at the Beach

I'm getting in early with this week's post, as I'll be away tomorrow and for the rest of the weekend. I'm off to the NSW central coast for a weekend with my project team. It's something like school camp, but much more nerdy, much more fun and no one to tell us to go to bed at 9pm.

I'll be showing the team what I've been up to for the last year, which is somewhat nerve-wracking and exciting. Exciting, because this time last year I had nothing, or less than nothing, to show them, and this year I've got lots of my own data. Nerve-wracking because showing people your analysis - even a tentative one - is always stressful. Fortunately they're all very nice people so I won't be too worried.

And in language news this week, we see that computational manipulation of language can actually have some good.

Confirmed!

Sorry, this post has been a little slow in the writing - I'll attribute it to some kind of post-confirmation-brain-slush.

For those that I neglected to properly explain this process to the first time, confirmation is rather like going from being an L-Plate researcher to being a P-plater. It involves writing a 12,000 word paper on work to date (and with a field trip under my belt I had a lot to write), as well as a presentation in front of the department, and a meeting with my supervisory panel.

Given that the document was longer than my honours thesis, and written in less than two months, it was always going to be very much a work in progress. It's a good point at which to sit down, and really force some of those ideas that have been kicking around to become a little less vague.

As an overall process it's been good. I certainly feel a bit more focused that I was before-hand. It's been a bit of a strange process though. Normally you hand in a paper, or an honours thesis and it's done and finished. But with confirmation there is an immediate barrage of feedback. Not that that's a bad thing - there's still another 2 years work of work to do. But it means that any complement paid is balanced with a wealth of ways to start looking forward. The report and presentation have not only made clear all those vague thoughts I've had for the last year or so, but it's also illuminated the mind-numbing amount of work that needs to be done before my thesis begins to sound even half convincing.

The First Meeting Back

Yesterday was my first meeting with my supervisor since I left on my trip. For the three months I was away she was subjected to emails from me if I had a problem. I was, to say the least, apprehensive about showing my work - I had visions of the conversation ending with 'so that's all that you did in three months' or 'you forgot to check whether it had x/y/z important feature.'

Much to my relief there were no comments along those lines. It was relieving when I was told 'well, it looks like you'll have enough to actually write a thesis.' It kind of scares me that it takes until almost 1/3 of the way through to come to that conclusion.

And no, I haven't forgotten those all important statistics, I'll put them up over the weekend.

Confirmation

I think, in an earlier post, I made passing reference to that dreaded C-word. That distasteful word that makes me cringe every time I hear someone say it. Yes, that's right - it's coming up to confirmation time...

Christian initiation rites aside, confirmation is the 12 month point of a PhD research program, which for me is early March. It involves a variety of horrors. One is that I have to write a 10,000 word paper, which I haven't even started thinking about. Considering I spent 9 months writing a 12,000 word piece for Honours this gives an indication there might be a few sleepless nights over the next month or two. The other thing is that I have to present my research-to-date and future plans in a talk to the entire department.

My plan, at the moment, is to just fill my slides with lots of pretty pictures of the landscape that I took on my field trip. I'm sure this plan can't possibly fail me!