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Why research is all-consuming
Introduction
Scroll through the ArXiV on a typical Wednesday night and you’ll see all sorts of papers that are each a culmination of many months of effort, lots of dead ends, and many revisions. Let alone the future steps to push the paper drafts to publishable quality, and many months of waiting for referees to look over the papers.
September 8 marked the one-year anniversary of my commitment to a specific thesis project and a wonderful team of two co-advisors (see my earlier article for the story of how I found this team). Since I started working with them, the workload has grown exponentially, to the point where the amount of time I spend working on research is the greatest amount possible so I don’t either burn out or ignore my coursework and teaching responsibilities. Perhaps this is more than I need to do to stay on a pace that my advisors are satisfied with, but I am trying to make the highest-quality thesis possible, leaving no stone unturned. One of my advisors said, “being a Ph.D. student is really a full-time job.” It has taken me a year to fully realize and embrace that sentiment.
In this article I’m going to talk about why my research really is all-consuming, breaking my project into the different types of tasks I spend time on.