These posts are related to my time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel (UNC), specifically the School of Library and Information and Science (SILS), where I graduated with a Master’s of Science in Information Science in 2004. I also received my Bachelor’s degree in linguistics at UNC in 2002.
like so many open ended final projects, it was really hard buckling down to do any actual work. i spent sunday evening psyching myself up for doing work monday. i did my research monday, which consisted of using tribe.net at strongs, and i conceptualized the presentation tuesday morning before giving it at 2pm for nearly an hour and a half. can we say exhaustion?
coming up next week: present final project for human computer interactions, write paper for censorship, turn 24.
thinking about: how my life will change once school is over.
i woke up at 8am. dog seems to be barking somewhere (next door?) every morning. non stop. so i got 6hrs, but well, i’ve done pretty bad maintaining any sort of sleep schedule this semester. maybe it’s this 9:30am class. iow, not a big deal.
next semester is not looking too hot: in order to graduate i have to take information retrieval. same prof as research methods. 8AM. that deserves an infix. i’ve been attending this university for 6 years. never ever ever in those 6 years have i ever taken a class at 8AM. never. ever.
taking a semester off is looking better and better every day.
so i just made my excel calendar. four weeks till i turn in my masters paper proposal (for this class–not for real) and the semester ends.
looking back i can see this has plagued me before: in january when i first identified the problem, in february when i explained in some detail what the heck i mean by a negative expense, and most recently in may when i enlisted the cognitive muscle of my dad.
at work i’m usually responsible for defining problems and finding solutions. if i come up with a bad solution, it could mean there’s a better solution, or it could mean something’s wrong with the problem (or it could mean that i’m being dumb). it’s really difficult to determine whether there’s a better solution that i don’t see, or whether i could reconstrue the problem, which would thus allow for a more elegant solution.
an aside: my emphasis on elegance as a value can be traced back to chip gerfen, who would urge us in phonology to find the most elegant solution to a linguistics problem. given two possible solutions, he would say the more elegant one is most likely right.
time to redefine a problem in life? i’ve really been hatin’ on my masters program lately. mostly because of this masters paper rigamarole. i just don’t want to jump through the hoops i have to jump through to do it. but rather than angsting over what to do, i could just leave sils and poof! masters paper problems disappear.
i’ve been slowly migrating the content of measure’s website to a database. it’s a funny process, i’m kind of letting the database and php code grow evolutionarily. there are a lot of special cases, and it’s hard to grok them all upfront. i haven’t bothered to worry about ER diagrams or anything yet. it’s nice not to worry sometimes, to just proceed and see what happens and make small decisions on the fly.
bothering me lately (and apparently i’m not alone):
i have to write a masters paper. in fact apparently today i’m supposed to be signing up for classes. for my LAST semester of classes EVER. but i have to have a masters paper/project advisor and the relationship i have with the professor i feel the closest to is at best contentious.
i really haven’t had time to sit down and think. or more accurately, my head hasn’t been thinking anything interesting as of late. i have some faith that even when my own thoughts are inaccessible to me, the out of reach neurons are working on a top-secret, special project that will surprise me with tremendous insight when i least expect it.
which leaves me to trudge through the tediouser thoughts of daily life, like…which classes should i take? considering one is research methods (required), one is censorship with chuck stone, one is an advanced seminar in human computer interaction with gary marchionini, and one is a seminar in virtual communities that paul jones rescheduled so that jean, jason, and i could take it—considering all this, there isn’t much choice as to what classes i’ll be taking/dropping.
the alternates include GIS (already dropped) and CMS. the content management class could rock my socks off, in which case, what do i do? take five classes when i’m used to taking three? drop marchionini’s class and further distance myself from the one person who *might* endure me long enough to advise me on a masters thesis? yeah, yeah that sounds like a good idea.
