Very good luck with your language skills refresher, but we always miss you when you're away, AT. Hurry back soon. :-)
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Soda, oh my goodness! How scary for you and the others! I'm so glad the person was at least arrested! Please be careful!
Ga, so sorry to hear about your parents. My mom is also in the same boat.
Tman2, good luck with your new studies and Hawaii? Awesome! I'd love to go there!
Work is a little better, but we are in the process of trying to hire someone which is rather stressful. I would like to take time off once in a while, so I hope we find someone soon!
I'm behind as usual....
Soda - please be safe. My mom works in a school environment and I always worry about the possibility of something like that happening.
Well wishes to everyone.
Hope you're doing OK Soda, that doesn't sound like a great position to be in! My best wishes to you and everyone else whose had trouble of late!
I've not been about much recently as I'm presently writing my dissertation (and going slightly insane in the process!). I'm listening to Eagles bootlegs whilst I do it and I've got through four concerts in the past ten hours of work. Honestly thinking about giving them a mention in my acknowledgements as they're keeping me going when nothing else is!
tlr, good luck with that! I remember when our own Soda was doing hers and it was quite stressful for her.
Hope everyone is doing well!
Good luck with your dissertation, thelastresort! What field of study are you doing your graduate studies in?
After a couple months of stressing a little bit out on college acceptances, I'm finally glad that they're all rolled out. I got accepted into my local CSU, San Jose State, but I was rejected by Cal Poly SLO for Business Admin - accounting w/ a 4.0 in community college. I was bummed about that for a month until I finally heard back from the UCs.
I was super happy that I got accepted into UC Irvine for Business last week and UC Davis (last week) and UC Berkeley for Economics today. I'm leaning towards Irvine just because I want to be a business major and not be forced to do a graduate degree in Econ to even have a shot at a job.
Berkeley is a great school, and it's very enticing despite me not applying for business, which is almost impossible to get in. My 3 in AP English didn't qualify for English 1A, so I knew that my chances were shot for business. I have a cousin who did Enviro Econ and Policy and he works for Google Maps, so there's some hope as an Econ major. The worst part is that I'm only a pre-Econ major at Berkeley, so if I don't get at least a 2.8 in major classes or overall (not sure), then I can't get into the Econ major.
I'm also glad that I got rejected by a good school that was in the middle of nowhere. At least I could see Fleetwood Mac at whatever school I got accepted to without worrying too much about transportation.
Good luck with the dissertation thelastresort.
I have lots of students writing dissertations right now. Advice I give to them when they're in this stage is as follows:
Remember to reference properly.
If you are struggling over language, remember that the first priority is that the reader can understand what you are saying. Use simple straightforward language unless more 'fancy' language does something the straightforward language does not.
Break your text up. It makes things much easier to read if your text is divided up with headings, subheadings, tables and figures (depending on topic), images, and paragraphs.
Paragraphs should be about a single topic. Don't try and put too many different concepts into a single sentence. It may sound silly to introduce a paragraph with a sentence that says what the paragraph is about, and end with a summary sentence, but it does actually work.
If you have trouble deciding what to write next, consider stopping and just writing a rough outline of the topics and sub-topics you're going to cover. Then once you've got the topics listed and ordered, you've broken your writing down into a list of topics, you've got a lot of small problems to solve, instead of one massive one.
Sometimes I start by writing out the chapter headings. Then I take the chapers and break them down into subheadings, then into sub-sub-headings. Even if I'm not going to use sub-sub-headings in the text. If I keep on breaking it down like that, I end up in a situation where each sub-sub-sub heading might be a single paragraph or even sentence. Then the whole thing becomes much easier to write. For me.
Remember that you know everything about your dissertation, but people reading it for the first time don't. Think about what the reader will know at each point when they are reading your thesis. Make sure that you describe things to them before you expect them to know them. The easiest example of this is that acronyms should be defined the first time you use them. But, it applies to more general concepts as well.