Post 45: Just Over the Half-Way Hump Trying to Keep Up the Energy!

Okay. Deep breaths. Square breathing, four seconds at a time.

This semester is proving more challenging than some previous semesters, and enormous amount of work at this point in the semester has no small role to play in that. I definitely like to be busy and feel productive, but there comes a point when everything feels a bit too much like madness and the burden of all my commitments feels overwhelming. Gotta keep something of an eye on balance, because when everything smashes together, it stops being fun, and it stops being what I want to do, and I don't like to coerce myself to relieve the pressure of deadlines and seeing through obligations.

Just last week I was buried in marking for the class I'm TAing, and it felt like last minute scrambling to get it all done. I was also hurriedly trying to edit my third thesis chapter to submit for Friday (got it in at 1:30AM, phew!), and dealing with guilt at not having more done on my other research project regarding climate change adaptation.

Walking towards Cadboro Bay, Mt. Baker off in the hazy evening rouge. 

So at this point in the semester the big challenge is fending off tiredness, making sure I get enough sleep, am still eating well, and still finding the energy to TA well, keep on top of my commitments, and meet all my deadlines. I had really bad stress anxiety last week, which felt horrible, and I'm so glad things are more under control now.

When life hands us the busy-time lemons, it seems like one of the best things to do is admit that things are hard, and try to tackle things on the to-do list so the stress can level off, and the super-stress is no longer useful. It was also really helpful for me to remind myself that as stiff as I think the deadlines are, I can still make time to go for a walk, and to get 8 hours of sleep, and to read in bed for 10 minutes before turning out the light. All of the little (and healthy) behavioural patterns that I usually still do are more than valuable and necessary for supporting me in accomplishing my work goals.

But when those tough moments hit, I am so grateful for the many kindnesses of my partner and friends for helping to keep my spirits up. The daylight savings time-change has also been incredible. I love that it's still light when I leave work now, and I still feel like doing things much later into the evening. It also helps that my iron levels are back up—I can feel the difference now, and I went to the gym on Sunday again for the first time in almost 4 months! YAY!

So here's to celebrating the small successes along the way, and acknowledging just how much I am getting done. It's harder to do than I sometimes think, with the next task ahead of me right away.

All in all, though, it's been a lovely week, especially so when I remember back to last week. I went to a reading and spent an evening with a close friend on Tuesday, and today we had a great lab meeting, Skyping in a grad student in our program, Kira Hoffman, who's at Oregon State University, for the semester, alongside another PhD guest, Christy James, who shares our building here at the university. Thank you, thank you to them both! I love hearing their different perspectives (more on this in the next post), and just appreciate having these conversations a lot.

Another gorgeous West Coast evening. Love these skies!

Afterwards, we had a mini-celebration with Rob Watt, long-time Mountain Legacy supporter and expert—he's likely the most knowledgeable person in Canada about the historical topographical maps that MLP uses for its research. Between a few really tasty snacks, and excellent storytelling by my supervisor, Rob, and MLP expert, Mary, it was an afternoon that zipped right by, and had my sides hurting from all the laughter. Great way to bring to a close a very good week.

Research-wise, I'm getting back into NVivo, and strategizing how to write my fourth chapter, which will cover my findings from the interviews. More on that soon, too.

Post 44: Mental Health Awareness at UVic

This lunch hour I attended the first of two round table talks on Mental Health Awareness, put on by UVic's Mental Health Task Force, and it was very, very good. This talk was about Anxiety: When The Worry Won't Stop; the second, on March 18th, from 12:00-1:30, will discuss Living, Learning, and Working with a Mental Health Diagnosis, in MacLaurin Room D 010.

We started off with a really refreshing and brief meditation session, where the fellow that led the session got us all to ground ourselves, and focus our attention to breathing. For some people, it was the first time they had ever done something like that, and it was great to hear how much of a difference it made to them! I don't usually like the sitting/standing still and meditating practices; I am a meditate-in-motion kind of person, and find a lot of calm when I exercise. This is also one of the main reasons why I prefer really active yoga like flow, or ashtanga, as opposed to the slower ones like yin or meditation yoga. But for the start of the workshop, I thought this was great!

Another wonderful evening on campus! My skyline, just before catching the bus home at the end the day. 

Reflecting on the talk, this post will highlight the people and resources that I am able to recall, as well as briefly discuss a couple of the themes that arose. I was amazed by how diverse a crowd the talk drew: there were a variety of resource folks present, and it was a nice mix of internal and external resources I didn't know UVic or the wider community had. The introductions went quite quickly, so I didn't manage to remember any names, but here are the resources that I remember.

UVic Counselling Services: they run a number of workshops on stress and anxiety and managing panic, through a variety of techniques, including cognitive behavioural therapy, ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy), and mindfulness practices. Here's a link for those workshops.  A number of their counsellors can also be visited with individual appointments as well.

UVic Human Resources also had a staff person there, one of their Work Life Consultants; he expressed that if you're someone who is dealing with a mental health illness, then HR can work with that individual to sort out adjustments that can be made so their work relationship at the University can still be a positive and productive one.

Dr. Lara Robinson, a professor from the Psychology department was there, and offered a number of important advice points, and shared that she takes on a couple of clients each semester at a reduced rate, addressing anxiety mental health issues. She also mentioned that the Psychology department has ongoing studies and research relating to wellness and anxiety, so send her an email if that sounds interesting at all. From what I remember, she mentioned that you could pair up with graduate student at a very reduced rate ($10 per session) to address ongoing problems.

Darryl (sp?) who works with/at the Anxiety Clinic in Victoria also had a very strong presence during the discussion, and it was very clear that he was well versed in the science of treating anxiety disorders and issues. He described anxiety issues as "bad mental habits," which is, I think, a very good way to think about anxiety.

Lovely bouquet i put together last year; my partner loves lilies, and I loved the bright colour contrast. :) 

One of the Residence Life student coordinators was there to share his perspective on both living with and dealing with anxiety himself, and training his crew of residence advisors to help provide resources and support to students. ResLife comes into contact with about 60-70% of the first year student population at UVic, so they have an immense impact with students. I spoke with him right after the talk and it sounds like ResLife is making a big effort to make sure students are aware of their resources when it comes to dealing with mental health, and that was really great to hear. Here's a link to some of the activities they put on in residence.

There was also a lovely gal from the Meditation Club on campus there! They put on regular meditation sessions to encourage and support students with decompressing from the stress of academia. And that is probably one of the main themes that arose during the session: the importance of grounding exercises, meditation, and bringing awareness to simple things like breathing. Darryl from the Anxiety Clinic mentioned that a panic attack can be triggered by shallow breathing, which we do when we're really stressed out. So the square breathing technique can be really helpful: breathing in for 4 seconds, holding the breath for 4 seconds, breathing out for 4 seconds, and holding the breath for another 4 seconds before inhaling again.

There were a number of people from different places across campus in the crowd, some faculty, some students, some grad students like myself, as well as parents that deal with anxiety, and parents with children who deal with anxiety. I was also very pleased to see great representation from Campus Security there! One of them mentioned that they are increasingly getting calls from students, faculty, and staff that deal with anxiety and mental health issues across campus. This reminds me that I recently read about the Nelson police chief wanting to establish a Mental Health Car like the one that Vancouver has, to better address the increasing calls they see there, which I think is a phenomenal idea!

Grumpy cat pal that I encountered on one of my evening walks in Oak Bay! :)

One of the most important themes of the discussion was around normalizing these kinds of mental health issues. A lot of people deal with them, and universities breed anxiety, even for people who don't otherwise have full blown disorders or may only have one panic attack, or deal with low-level anxiety that doesn't regularly interfere with their work or daily life. So when encountering someone who's dealing with anxiety, listening to them, admitting when we don't know much about what their experience is, or being authentic and sincere when empathizing with them, and referring them to places where they do have resources is probably one of the best things we can do.

As educators, I think one of the main things we can do to reduce the stigma of mental health issues is to encourage transparency around these issues. I know in one or two of my tutorials this semester I mentioned that if students are struggling with anything (mental health, personal life challenges, other health issues, or just bad scheduling, such as 3 assignments in 2 days), they can let me know and I will do my best to accommodate their need. I've had a couple students contact me with such requests, and it seems to have made a really big difference for them.

Talking about, acknowledging, and accepting in a non-judgmental way that people can suffer from and with these often invisible issues was another of the main themes that came from the discussion, whether it was a comment from a student who has been dealing with anxiety for years, or one of the resource people acknowledging that people build these behavioural habits, which become messy when avoidance and poor relationships and communication enter the mix, too.

Whew! This post has already become a lot longer than I'd thought, so I'll end it here! I'm glad I went to this workshop, and I now know a lot more about some of the anxiety resources we have across campus and from without, and I hope that should I be in a teaching position in the future, I'll remember to at least at one point during the semester (preferably at the beginning), mention to my students that if they're dealing with a mental health issue or other issues, they can let me know and I can try to accommodate the unexpected challenges that life throws our way sometimes.

Post 43: Student Health 101, Tutorial teaching, Writing Group, and Research Progress!!

Yesterday I got the most delightful email! I regularly read the Student Health 101 magazine that comes out every month, and saw some time last semester that they regularly solicit short student videos about a number of different topics, and so I decided that at some point I would try to learn how to put together a short video and submit something for a topic that I cared about and thought I had some useful advice. So a few weeks ago I submitted a little video about what I do to control my texting! As an introvert I LOVE texting, but try not to be on my phone all the time, so what I've found really helps me is to turn off the sound on my cell, which means that I don't get sound notifications every time I get a text, and that I reach for my phone when I am taking a purposeful break. Ultimately, it means fewer distractions, and is useful for things where the stakes are really high, like not driving and texting at the same time, or getting distracted by texts, then.

So, after spending about 3 hours learning how to use the iMovie program, and first, getting the length right, getting less nervous, rehearsing my little script so that I could concisely say what I wanted, and about 13 recordings later.... I submitted a video that I thought was not too bad. Certainly, I was tired and exasperated enough then to feel like throwing in the towel, and I thought that the sense of accomplishment from just sending it would do just great. So off it went!

AND YESTERDAY I FOUND OUT IT GOT CHOSEN!! That was really delightful! Now, I hope that there's a useful bit of advice out there for someone, or a couple someones, and now I have broken into my career as a video-journalist.

Okay, maybe not. But now I know a tiny bit about making a really short and simple video, which I didn't before I tried that.

Mini-salal (Gaultheria shallon) inside a stump along a trail through East Sooke Park!

My writing group and I also met yesterday afternoon, and it was such a productive afternoon!! We Skyped in our colleague Liz who's moved back to California at the beginning of this year; she's working on edits of her full thesis draft to get back to her supervisors, and wanted to get the first few chapters of her thesis back to them by the end of this week. She'd already gone through and addressed a lot of the simpler edits, and was working on some of the higher level (read: more challenging) edits when we checked in with her. The dynamic was admittedly a little bit different not having her in the room, but it was so nice to hear about how she was doing, and I think it really helped to reinforce her motivation to keep pushing through those edits, so I think it worked out for all of us. (I did check in with the others in the group this afternoon, and it sounds like it's working for us all.)

We did Pomodoros almost the entire afternoon, and I got so much done!! I wrote over 1500 words of new material: sections that have been floating in my head for the last couple weeks as I've been adjusting my energy budget to TAing (yesterady the 3 hours of teaching in a row didn't completely wipe me out, unlike the first week of tutorials, where I felt like I had run a marathon!). Between the new material, and going back for more edits to solidify a draft of my third chapter, it feels so good to see it coming together!

My third chapter is my methods chapter, and covers everything from the data collection, interview analysis and journaling, scope and limitations, and challenges. This will be, I think, the shortest of my thesis chapters, and has definitely been the most fun to write so far: it's had me reminiscing about my research trips, my wonderful participants, and the experiences I had when gathering that data. For example, there was a big theme of kindness of strangers for making those research trips work: when in Edmonton, I stayed with friends of my supervisor, a lovely couple, once of whom teaches at the University of Alberta. They hosted me while I visited the researchers there. When I was in Prince George, I was trying to find some milk for cereal the next morning, and I met Merlin, who gave me a lift down the highway to the nearest grocery store because it was on his way, and saved me a bunch of time. We still keep in touch!

And also while in Prince George, I spent a day driving logging roads with a wonderful woman and grad student there, Benita! We were enjoying the landscape and looking at forest regeneration and what shape the forests were taking about 15 years after the mountain pine beetle first passed through, and one of the numerous main areas where the outbreak began. It was a fantastic day, where we almost ran out of gas, and had to stop by a lodge to gets 15$ worth of gas from a canister. We took photos of the aspen forests and the lodgepole pines, and picnicked on the side of the Nechako River at someone's former hunting cabin; we had met the owner when we were stopped along the forestry service road to take photos, and the father and son came driving by and offered it to us as a lunch spot! That was a truly magical day.

Those research trips were a blast!

Signposts along the way. Great romp through the park. :)

In tutorial today, my students and I were discussing citation styles (in particular APA), and going over how to properly put together a citation, why we'd want to do that, and then a much larger discussion around how to assess the authoritativeness of a source, and understand the context of a particular article.

These kinds of critical thinking skills are sooooo important, and what myself and the other TAs has seen from the assignments was that students weren't quite researching deeply enough into where the voices of their sources were coming from, which includes everything from the funding people receive, the credentials they have, the journal/newspaper/magazine they are published in, the impact factor of the journal, and otherwise the bigger picture of locating and situating their voice in the discussion of [insert theme here].

They are bright students, I know they are, and I hope they'll use the information to their advantage; they need to show me that they can use the above outlined skills for their next assignment, so I am hopeful they will.

We hiked up a little island that you can't access when the tide is high. Beautiful teal waters in the little cove to see. 

Post 42: Whipping through marking... what a festival! And a week's mish-mash! And a StandStand Review!

So many assignments to get through, so many words to read, writing lots of comments/feedback, and trying to be fair while assessing student work.

Now don't get me wrong: I love my students to bits, and it's very very fun getting to meet them all (and trying to remember all their names!). They are a delight. And while it wipes out the majority of the energy that I start the day with, especially teaching 3 hours in a row, it has been great so far. I really do enjoy marking, but as this is my first time TAing an introductory-level course, and there are quite a few factors that are different in TAing one such course, as opposed to an upper level course.

For one, this is some of the first times that students are taking on the assignments that they're taking on. So for example, some of them don't yet know that hand-written work is not acceptable for university assignments (and some seem to have ignored that it was stated in the syllabus).

Ah yes, speaking of: a good many students don't read the syllabus. So you have to keep reminding them to go back to that thing, which is really the contract for the class.

My Dotmocracy in action: Students in my fourth tutorial voting for small scale food production
as their theme to research for the semester. 

On that note: repeat everything at least twice, especially important information, or you'll find out exactly who wasn't paying attention when you said it that one and only first time.

My students are learning how to engage with the research process right now, and we've gotten the first assignment out of the way: making a bibliography of 8 quality sources (on the topic we've specified), and explaining why each source is authoritative.

A lot of students don't yet know what makes a source authoritative (which makes sense; if they did, they wouldn't be here), and while some of them get half way there, it's clear they don't yet understand what peer-review is, and how to dig into how good journals really are, or what reputation a newspaper's specific journalists have... well, that is the fun sleuthing that they are starting to learn. From what I've noticed, many seem to have trouble differentiating assessing a source's credibility, and for now are simply writing a summary of the article. (Hence the reminder to go read the assignment outline). So I think we'll be revisiting some material next week.

For this second major assignment, we're asking our students to put together summaries of about 150 words on each of the 6 articles they've chosen from their original 8 (or swapped out with better sources from peers or researched new ones). For these, they will answer the question: "What is the author arguing/talking about?"

Awesome participation as my students wrote themes from their initial stab at researching their theme;
this one on the 100-Mile Diet. 

I'm really hopeful that they'll do well with this one, because quite a few of them have already been doing summaries for the first assignment, which means they won't do well there, but hopefully they will on this next one.

Through all of this, I've had the most excellent company for marking! I've teamed up with Edward White, the TAC from Sociology, (whose workshop on surviving marking I completely enjoyed last semester at the TA Conference, and blogged about here) whose delightful company has made getting an early start on my marking a real delight. This week on Wednesday he spoiled my colleague C— and I with the most delicious rice pudding: super rich, creamy, and with real vanilla... MMMMMMM! We snacked on this through the afternoon, and I wasn't hungry until 8PM! Plus, it's really great getting his seasoned reasoning and opinion on how to mark certain work. It's been great.

*****

Aside from the marking, I've really been enjoying the Christmas gift that I bought myself way back in the fall. It arrived just before Christmas when I was home in the Kootenays, so I got to open it when I got back: it's called a StandStand. And I love it!! (Or I really did, once I had added a bit more glue to one of the little knobs that holds the three pieces together when its dissembled; it kept falling out. BUT -- it was a very simple fix, and after a night's drying, was ready to go again.)

My work desk with my StandStand deployed! :) 

I simply don't have the money for a standing desk like the TableAir  ($2200) or NextDesk (which rings in at about $1500 for the base model). For those interested, on top of a great summary of the health problems that come from sitting too much (sedentary lifestyles), Mark Lukach at the Wirecutter has had a ball testing out standing desks alongside his coworkers, which you can read about here. I am aware that Colin Nederkoorn has come up with a 22$ IKEA DIY, but I am neither near an IKEA, nor have the time to wander out and get these materials, so in the fall last year, spending about $65 on this Kickstarter project seemed like a good idea.

The StandStand has been really really great! I love how portable it is, first and foremost, and because it's so lightweight, I can easily switch between standing and sitting, which research supports is a good thing to do (too much standing = bad; too much sitting = worse). It's suuuuuper easy to assemble and dissemble, which I also really love. My little StandStand has been really great, and definitely an investment suitable for my lifestyle and income right now. :) (Though I am glad to see the price of standing desks falling; one of the most affordable, the Stand Desk now comes in at about $500. )

And the best part of it is that I'm starting to get a lot more comfortable using it. I've started to pull it out when I'm with my colleagues at work, and I even used it this past Wednesday when I was marking with Edward. :)

The semester is already whizzing by; I can't believe it's already January, but I have 80 lovely students to keep me from dwelling on the time. Back to marking I go!

One more awesome photo: a mixture of lichen and stonecrop from a romp in
East Sooke Park this past weekend. I love the colours!

Post 41: Everything's ramping up again! Writing Group, TCG and TAing!

Phew, what a busy last few weeks it's been!

My writing group is starting up again this semester, though in a markedly different capacity than last semester. This time it'll be a once-a-week, Tuesday afternoon, dig a hole for myself in the Grad Student House date right now, with a few of my colleagues. Format-wise, it'll be very similar to last semester, with everyone bringing work independent of the others, but working together in a very supportive space. And - Matt at the GSS has enabled me to book a regular afternoon time for the WHOLE semester in one shot, so that's really helpful, too!

I'm also trying to sort out a meeting time with another colleague who can't make the Tuesdays, so it looks like J— and I will be trying to make Monday afternoons our writing time.

This is really great, and I'm very excited for having the structural support of writing time.

Awesome rainy evening walk! I love the light spiderwebbing in the tree! :)

I'm staring down the calendar for my first tutorials (3 in a row!) tomorrow morning, which is going to be tiring, but I'm really excited for them. I love meeting my students for the first time, and it's great that it gets to happen every so often. Today my fellow TAs and the instructor for the course met to discuss tutorial themes (the course is looking at environmental issues through food) and a layout of the assignments the groups are doing for the next few months (we met last week to discuss this already), and now I'm even more excited. The themes we're taking to the tutorials include:

Industrial agriculture (meat production, grain production, animal ethics)
Organic foods
100-Mile Diet
Traditional food systems
Industrial Water Use
Small scale food production systems (family farms, permaculture, community gardens)
Food Waste Management
Aquaculture (fish farms, oyster farms, fishing)

There's so much to talk about in each one! Each tutorial will take one theme and students will specialize within the theme, and will do a series of assignments building skills around critical thinking and assessment over the semester. And the big challenge: the tutorials are only 50 minutes in each tutorial.

So I've planned out my icebreaker, and we'll be doing nametags as well, and to choose a theme (I'll bring about 5 to each tutorial), we'll have a Dotmocracy to pick a tutorial theme after a short pitch for each one. In this case, I think the Dotmocracy will work really well for choosing, because it doesn't take too much time, it's very participatory (everyone partakes), and we already have the themes to choose from. There also aren't too many of them, which I think is helpful. Normally, the full Dotmocracy procedure would include ideas being contributed through the session and then being voted on, but we won't quite be doing that here. We'll also be reflecting on the 24-hr Food Journals that they were assigned from last week, which is a great assignment to start students thinking about their food choices, where their food comes from, it's production, and all sorts of things related to what they specifically are eating. I think it should be great fun. With a little bit more prep tonight, I'll be ready to go!

Beautiful evening sunset, looking out from the McPherson Library. 

Work with the municipal Environmental Advisory Committee I've been a part of since September, has been busy busy busy over the past few weeks. In October we started talking about putting together a presentation for Council, expressing just how important we think it is for them to adopt a climate change lens (both on mitigation and adaptation), and then we were trying to balance that with other environmental initiatives and projects that we think are important. So over the past few days we've been finishing the two report documents that we had to get them today by 3PM. It's great to see everything come together, and now we'll sit and wait a bit to see Council's reaction.

And my lovely Thesis Completion Group has started up again. This semester's different again, too, as I joined the Friday group (on Tuesdays I now TA), and it's so great just to chat everything through, get off my heart what I'm anxious about, and how to work through those worries, so I can get closer to finishing this degree and thesis.

Speaking of! Time to get going and clearing the decks so I can get more writing done!

Post 40: The 3 Minute Thesis Competition!

I know this is my third post in three days! I've been having a really productive time finalizing my conference presentation for the International TA conference, and today when I was taking a break and checking my email, I saw a call (once again) for the 3 Minute Thesis Competition (3MT), and wanted to get a post up ASAP, because the deadline to apply is this Friday, January 9th!

The 3MT is fundamentally about science communication and being able to compellingly communicate your research story to a general audience. I forewent this last year to participate in the SSHRC Storyteller's Competition, and which I'll probably try again, this year.

UVic provides a few training sessions in mid/late January:

Tactics and Strategies for 3MTJanuary 19, 2015  - 2:00-3:30 pm, University Centre Bldg. Rm A180andJanuary 23, 2015 - 10:30 am - noon, University Centre Bldg. Rm A180

Very usefully, UVic also provides sample of what the 3MT looks like, by showing the winners from last year's competition.

I texted with my colleague G— as I was filling in my registration earlier today. Here's a link for the form.

I hit "Print" and saved a .pdf version of the filled out form, which needs to be emailed to Ms. Carolyn Swayze at fgscirc@uvic.ca. Again, the deadline is this Friday, January 9th! 

Post 39: Reflecting on My Writing Group

In early December I participated in a panel discussion at UVic's first Thesis Writing Bootcamp, which was meant to give graduate students an opportunity to write and have a great space and supported atmosphere in which to make headway on their thesis writing projects. I thought this was a great initiative, and several members of my thesis completion group attended.

For the panel, I'd been asked to reflect on a couple of questions:

1. How did you decide who to invite to participate with you?

2. How often do you meet?  for how long each time?

3. What 3 things have contributed most to your group's success?

4. What advice would you offer people thinking about starting their own group?

I thought that for this blog post I'd re-state some of my answers, since it's a new semester and it's time to try to build a new group, as two of the members finished their thesis projects, as well as emphasize some of the themes of the panel discussion, which were very complimentary to my own thoughts on having a writing group. 

Rainy UVic campus leaves—beautiful if one pauses to enjoy them! :)

As for my own responses, briefly: 

I was essentially adopted into the writing group that I now have. The writing group core existed, and by good luck I was invited to one of the writing sessions, and invited to stay. I very quickly became one of the organizing members, actively seeking meeting times and locations, and helping to make the writing group work well. The writers were graduate students, a mix of PhD and master's, all of whom wanted to make progress on their thesis i a supportive environment. We had the agreement to do Pomodoros together (perhaps not every session), but the goals each time were to either make progress on a piece of writing for our theses, or clear the plate on some of the necessary things that we needed to address in order to set ourselves up for writing on our theses. While there was a small core group of the membership, we invited others to join us with great flexibility, including colleagues, and other members from other thesis groups. At our largest, we had about 8 people come to a session.
Our meeting times were variable; we tried for 3-4 times a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, about 12PM to 5 or 6 PM, and sometimes on Sundays. Wednesdays there's free coffee and goodies at the Graduate Student Centre in the morning at 9:00AM, so we'd try to make it there for that for an earlier start. 

Some of the main things that contributed to the success of our group include the environment that we created: it was supportive, welcoming, positive, and flexible (flexibility is something that was consistent among the comments of the panel members). We wanted to get Pomodoros of thesis writing done, but if someone had to write emails or read some journal articles, or do some edits on a chunk of writing, that was all really great. 
Having our scheduling fairly consistent (the three days a week), even if the venue changed. And having that planned up to a week in advance, or at least having a good way of communicating to the group when and where we were meeting (we used Google Calendar).

Two of the members of the core group from last semester have finished up their thesis projects, and I am so happy and proud of them! We had a very small celebratory meet at the end of last semester, and I got a holiday email from one of the two of them. I wish them all the best with their future endeavours (one has moved back home already), and hope that I'm able to make these friendships last (and even if they don't, I am content that there are two more wonderful people with great ideas out in the world, and I'm grateful for the time we were able to spend together). 

And advice that I'd pass on to other people thinking of starting their own group: go ahead and do it! But be clear about the goals and intentions of the group. It was great to have a group of people that were committed to hard work and getting things done, and we were able to stick with that, have breaks throughout, and build friendships from the group. 

A few of the members of the panel had writing groups that were structured differently: in one, it was very small (3 people) who shared writing, met every 2-3 weeks, and there was an expectation that writing that was shared would have been read, and that when the group met, they would discuss the writing, and set up who would submit next. What really made that group work was the commitment to it (also it's flexibility if they were unable to meet in 2-3 weeks), but recognizing that it had a very set structure and required the members to follow through with their commitments to the group.  

I would also add that it only takes a little bit of leadership to get a group going. I have a few people that I'm going to reach out to in order to make my writing group this new semester get going, and I know that it's an email's send away to start setting up writing dates. 

Having a writing group makes the entire experience much more real, much more doable, and really shifted my perspective to feeling very positive about the writing I was doing. At some point, it would be great to share my writing with a colleague, my partner, or someone else from my department before I send the next chapter off to my supervisor, but I know that even if I don't manage to make that step happen (which is more personal preference than anything else), then my supervisor will provide great feedback, much as he has done in the past.

So here's to starting off a new writing group, and new semester! 

Post 38: New Year, New Semester, Setting Perspective

Happy 2015! Wishing everyone health, happiness, a small dash of good luck, and many good times with friends and family for the new year.

I got into Victoria with a bit of a bang last night; my flight was delayed by about an hour and a half due to mechanical issues with the plane, and to top it off, the baggage folks ran out of room at the back of the plane, so we had to take on some of the bags at the front of the plane! So in total, the travel time from home was once again, over 9 hours. It is, at the best of times, a challenge to get out of the Kootenays. This post is more personal than any of my previous ones, on account of it just having been New Years and Christmas.

My hometown, Kaslo, as it sits on the banks of Kootenay Lake, slightly hidden from view by the trees.

It's rainy in Victoria—quite a different scene from the white snowy world of the Kootenays that I've been immersed in over the past 2 weeks, visiting my family. The break was great: I did a little bit of work while I was home, but between walking Laika, my parents' dog, shovelling a bit of snow, bringing in firewood, and helping with my family's business, it felt really good to take a bit of time off. I should also admit I was forced to take a bit of a break: my sister's fiancee came back from a visit to his folks out east with a horrible cold, which he gave to my sister, which I seem to have picked up from her. So, bogged down with a stuffy nose, head cold and headaches, I wasn't doing much for a few days, but that was fine, too.

Laika, bounding through the snow, always in action. 

Back in Victoria, I'm staring at my calendar. I have a few days before I lead a 1.5 hour conference session at the TA Conference here at UVic. I also want to wrap up my edits to my third chapter, my methods chapter, in the next week or so. TAing will start in the next two weeks, so it's good timing to be thinking about how to start first tutorials again, and what my relationship with a new class and new batch of students might be like. There are a couple of other small things on the side of that: I have a few hours to make up from my second research project, and for that project, an abstract is due in about two weeks for a conference at the end of May. For the same project, I've also to go download and figure out how to use HyperResearch, a qualitative data analysis program similar to NVivo (look for a post on that coming soon!) It feels like a very different world from one at home where I was walking the dog every day, and finding someone to play cards (mostly Skat), or having tea with my whole family, where I'm listening to my grandparents reminisce about their drives around various parts of Germany or surrounding countries.

I'll admit I'm a bit stuck on my memories of home, so this post will have quite a few photos of my time there. Laika, my parents' dog, is fantastic company. I got out almost every day because she needs a walk, and she paid me back by staying up with me later than most people in my family (my parents are bakers, and rise very early). She was an almost constant companion. I really enjoyed my time with my sister and her fiancee, and my brother and his girlfriend and her son, my grandparents, and my parents. Everyone. I miss them a lot when I'm not home, and while sometimes it's easier to forget that I miss them, it's that much harder when I go back home. And of course, there are always the mountains and the landscape of the Kootenays. What a phenomenal corner of this province I was lucky enough to grow up in (and here chime the sentimental bells...).

On a mini-hike up a ridge about 5 km outside my hometown; looking across Kootenay Lake.

I'll say it's a bit difficult coming back while still getting over a cold. I spent the day in today, tidying around the small apartment I share with my partner, putting clothes and presents away, catching us up on some dishes, accepting vegetable soup from his mother, and doing a little bit of reading. It's been a quiet day, but I haven't yet felt up for more. Perhaps tomorrow will be a day for getting more work done, and for facing the rain. Here's a photo from earlier in December here, with Oak Bay Avenue light up by Christmas lights (below). I hope they stay up for a good bit longer, as Victoria usually faces a good stretch of grey this time of year, which is arguably the toughest to face.

Oak Bay Avenue, at night, with Christmas lights!

But, I am very fortunate to have had great company to pick me up starting at the airport, where my lovely partner, Mike, came out to greet me.

So here's to starting off 2015 right, and readying for a great conference presentation taking place in under a week!

Post 37: Advising students - to go to grad school, or not to go to grad school?

Over the past few weeks, I've been contacted by a couple students interested in chatting about grad school, and I was really excited to meet and chat with them. Considering grad school and options post-undergrad is a really exciting time for people, and I definitely approached this with enthusiasm and support, and from the perspective of encouraging them to consider their options fully.

Before going, however, I really had to think about what were really important things to emphasize about my journey through grad school, lessons learned, and things that I wish I had done differently or that otherwise would have been useful to know beforehand. So with this post, I'll cover a few of those things, but will start with a general discussion about mentoring undergrads and other students.

It's a lot of fun to share about my experience of grad school, but I decided that enthusiasm over my personal story shouldn't spill over to convince someone to go to grad school. It's a better discussion to approach from, Here's what I've learned since starting my program, and what might be useful for your to know when considering whether grad school may or may not be the right fit for you. There are a number of factors that people need to consider when deciding when it's a really good choice for someone. Part of that has to do with personal disposition, what they want out of grad school, if the program/supervisor is a good fit, and what their financial situation is.

Disposition: I'm someone who loves learning. Learning all the time. I read widely (sci-fi, fiction, literature, non-fiction, essays, poetry, etc.), I love film, I like music, and treat each of these things and something new I'm learning about the world. Since entering grad school, I've become much choosier about each of these things: learning to differentiate why I prefer one style over another, or what counts as a good source for research or not. Grad school has very much been a space for personal and professional development, and I'm glad that it has been.

I've also learned a lot by sitting on different committees (for selecting teaching awards and planning a graduate student conference), and I've taken part in all sorts of professional development workshops and conferences both on campus and elsewhere. I've learned how to use write and cite, how to make a conference poster, and how to take part in and give back to a writing group. I've learned that I quite like teaching. I've also figured out that I'm an introvert, and what that means for my teaching style. I've also learned a good bit about the impostor syndrome, and what that means for me as a student and how I view my accomplishments, and why I dwell so much on process. Almost all of these things are things that I wouldn't have anticipated before grad school, and I've loved learning all of them (even though some were really, really hard), but this also gives some indication to the kind of person I am, and how and why grad school's been a fruitful journey for me so far, considering I wanted a broad experience that didn't just churn me out as a good researcher by the end of the program.

Gorgeous look up valley out in the Goldstream Park right by Victoria. A nice dash of August green to challenge
the rainy grey of today!

Finances, funding, and resources

I was once told by a friend of mine in undergrad that people should not pay to go to grad school. And with almost no hesitation, I agree. In Canada, with a struggling job market (especially for younger educated people), we are having some trouble with education inflation, where having a bachelor's degree doesn't cut it anymore, and employers are preferentially choosing folks with at least a master's degree. Part of this is a crappy job market for young people, where employers can afford to be so choosey. This isn't great news considering that master's programs oftentimes are not an in-and-out kind of degree: even UVic's performance measures indicate that the average completion rate for master's degrees across the university is 4 years, and the average PhD program is 6 (see the graph buried on page 32 of the report). That's a long time, and that's a lot of money and stress and investment, considering most programs are advertised as 2 (master's) and 4 (PhD) years, respectively.

There are two things to emphasize here: it's not impossible to complete a master's in two years; one of the 13 students that started with me managed to do it. But that person was the exception. One of the students from my program has left, and the rest of us are still plugging along. We're not finished not because we haven't been working hard, but there's a whole lot more to a master's than I think a lot of us imagined when we began.

So, looking at the average numbers, and recognizing that funding typically covers the first two years of a program (this may vary in departments), I advise students to have an honest discussion with their potential supervisor or with the program graduate advisor to get a sense of which professors are taking on students, what completion rates are like, and/or other resources (such as the Thesis Completion Group, or the Centre for Academic Communication) that are going to get them finishing faster if they are on a tighter timeline. Finances are important, and when the funding runs out, as students take on part-time or full-time jobs to cover their money needs, it's no wonder that it can take longer for them to finish their programs. Talking about funding and funding possibilities (grants, scholarships, bursaries, etc.) that will help keep them covered while they study is key, too (oftentimes students still have debt from their undergraduate degrees). Discussing teaching assistant possibilities and other research work can be very important. As well, because grants like the big federal ones (SSHRC, NSERC, and CIHR) are frequently peer-reviewed, almost no school will turn you down if you've already been offered one of these grants; essentially, that grant offer is validating that you have demonstrated you have the potential to undertake excellent research. The MITACS program has also emerged in recent years as an important funding source for graduate students. Getting your financial ducks in a row is really, really important! :)

Finding the right supervisor is also important! A lot of grad school is learning about relationships: how to manage them when the stress and expectations are high, and when work needs to get done. How to do this collegially, with a mentor-supervisor? Learning how to ask the right questions, and figuring out when to ask for help. Learning how to understand feedback, and make revisions. These are all aspects of this professional degree that I've had to work on, and continue to. And a lot of it hinges on how well my relationship with my supervisor is going. I've heard of a few horror stories from other graduate students (admittedly mostly at the PhD level), about supervisors who don't let them finish, who don't agree that the student is ready, who give feedback completely opposite to what another committee member said, etc. Learning how to deal with these is a must, and with a supervisor that's rooting for you and on your team, you will succeed. :)

A shot downstream at the Sooke Potholes—a must-visit summer spot in the area! 

There were also a couple basic things that the students I spoke with asked about.

Are there different types of degree programs? Yes. There are course-based master's, project  based master's, and research based master's. The one I'm working on is a research based master's. We have coursework for the first 8 months of the program, then we launch our projects and head out to do the empirical work. (I know less about the other two, but by letting students know about other possibilities, they can go check them out).

After we complete the empirical work, we usually do some sort of analysis (this will differ based on methodologies), and then write up a thesis, which is disseminated to our supervisor and committee member, and when they approve that document, we head to a thesis defence, which includes a third member from outside the department, who also has an interesting look at your thesis, provides feedback and asks probing questions, and at that defence, that committee decides how much needs to be revised in the thesis document. There are 4 ways the result of the defence can go: 1. pass without revisions (very rare); 2. pass with minor revisions (common). 3. pass with major revisions (less common, but still somewhat frequent), and 4. fail (extremely rare). Basically, by the time your supervisor and committee member agree that you are ready to defend, you should be in pretty good shape. But thesis defences are still a really big deal—and the reason why the internet is full of all sorts of memes addressing defences (or offences!).

There's a lot that goes into considering grad school, and I definitely recommended for those students to talk to potential supervisors in advance. Also, talking to some of the grad students of supervisors (though this, I think, would be even more important if someone's considering a Phd), could be useful, too.

Post 36: There are multiple zooms on the thesis writing camera: on realizing that writing the thesis is an organizational puzzle!

For many months I stressed about getting started on writing my thesis, and over the past two months, I've realized that most of it was overblown worry on my part. Writing is a lot of fun (and I definitely send big THANK YOUS to my writing group), and has been for a long time for me. So why all the insecurity, hesitation, and balking about the thesis writing?

Part of it is the size of the project, undoubtedly. This is probably the biggest thing that I will produce in my life so far (!!!!). Part of it as well, is the scrambled, getting lost in the details on my part, too. I was getting lost in the little pieces, and gazing at the pattern on one puzzle piece, while diving to the pick up the next puzzle piece without figuring out where the first one went.

Here's where I'm going to employ the camera metaphor: writing a big project is knowing when to zoom in, and when to zoom out. I recently wrote a post about paragraph thinking: but realized afterwards that paragraph thinking is only useful when you already know where what you're writing goes! :)

When I met with my supervisor a few weeks ago, we had a really great discussion where we realized that part of why I was asking so many questions about which section goes where is because I was in macro mode, when I needed to be in landscape mode! When we realized that, he asked me to write out kind of a one-pager outlining my entire thesis, how I was splitting up and organizing chapters. It was almost a relief to finally sketch out chapter contents and realize: This has to go, this can't be there, this isn't closely related enough; Oh, this section will be shorter and smaller in scope.... after all, master's theses are only about 75-100 pages (even though I have seen quite a few in my department that have been upwards of 150 pages).

Local maidenhair ferns, Adiantum aleuticum, hanging out in a cool spot, keeping their feet wet at the Sooke Potholes! 

Now for a different metaphor: in the past two weeks I also realized that writing a thesis is really about figuring how to fit puzzle pieces together. I had been walking around with a section on my scientists drafted in mind for a bit (who they are, why them, the different collaborations they engaged in when I thought at the beginning of my project there were more discrete research organizations, challenges in contacting various groups of them, etc.), and thinking about my methodology/methods chapter and what would go in there (methodology, methods, challenges and limitations), and what would go into my introductory chapter (thesis questions, abstract, great opening quote, context of climate change and rapid ecological change, and why it's important we engage with scientists).

So between juggling the various puzzle pieces, and organizing them into borders, and breaking them into colours and compatible sections (best puzzle building strategy!), things have gotten a lot easier and feel much more manageable. And I definitely can't underscore how important the emotional part of this project has been so far! It's nice to feel the buzz of seeing progress being made.

Onwards and upwards to stitching my 4 main literature sections together! :)