A week ago I signed off from my well-paid office job as a Data Analyst, in favour of focusing my attention on completion of my Masters thesis. Until then, I had been working full time days at work and then coming home and doing another 4-6 hours work on my research. And I was surprisingly good at it. At the expense of eating well, exercising and having a social life, I was demonstrating slow but steady progress each week.
It follows then that I expected my first week of being a full time student to be filled with checking things off my study to do list, smashing milestones and generally exceeding all expectations including my own.
How wrong I was.
It was 11.31am yesterday (Friday) when I realised I had just 90 minutes before I had to go to my regular weekly meeting with one of my research supervisors, 30 of which would be consumed by trying to make myself look presentable enough to assimilate into the youthful university population. As I started thinking about what discussion points to write into my notebook, it occurred to me that I had achieved nothing since she had last seen me. To make matters worse, I hadn't seen her in just over two weeks.
Panic started to set in. I ran unhelpful thoughts around my head as I stared blankly at my laptop screen.
"Maybe you will never finish this research? Maybe you are just not cut out for writing a thesis? Don't be ridiculous Ebonnie, you have already written one before. Yes, but that was just an Honours thesis. For fuck sake, what is wrong with you?What have you been doing all week?".
It wasn't as though I had been sitting on my butt all week watching re-runs of Supernatural (mainly because I finished the latest DVD the week before). I had achieved a number of tasks, including:
- Thrown a surprise Harry Potter themed 30th dinner with a high school friend for our other high school friend
- Re-arranged the furniture in our office after a particularly unproductive day, deciding that it was the feng shui of the room that was impeding my ability to think
- Attempted to start a similar thing in what will become the MeowCat studio space
- Created a twitter account
- Visted the dentist for my regular check up. This was actually quite an achievement for someone with a severe needle phobia, presented in the form of an unstoppable panic that I will be getting jabbed with something for some unknown reason that sets in anytime I step into a clinic of any kind.
- I washed my hair and set it with curl clips
- And I started this blog
Even as I type this, I have my thesis open on the other screen, begging to be worked on. Shhhh thesis. Later.
I convinced myself that attending the meeting would just disappoint everyone. Professors are busy people; they don't have time to waste listening to you verbally spew out all the reasons you have nothing to show them.
I concluded that emailing that information would be much more concise and somehow not an interruption. Retrospectively, probably not so. I sent a semi-rambling email explaining that I had been slow to make progress this week and felt it would be appropriate to postpone the meeting to next week. What should have been a short and simple email turned out to be 8 sentences long despite what I considered at the time to be an adequate proof read and word cull.
I received a 5 word reply. It was the response I wanted. The meeting was cheerfully postponed. But I immediately regretted my lengthy email. The usual self-doubt crept in.
"Your supervisors think you are a terrible student."
With hindsight on my side, the reality is that my supervisor is an extremely talented and busy researcher, lecturer and director, and she probably welcomed the extra hour in her day. Try telling that to the ADHD mouse that lives in my head, energetically spinning away on a wheel of neurotic thoughts all day and night.
I noticed the email below my supervisor's: the third reminder for the opportunity to attend a workshop on how to complete your research, a two day ordeal targeted at procrastinating students. I reluctantly registered to attend.
I am still not sure whether or not I am going just to avoid doing my work, or because I genuinely want to learn strategies that will help me 'not just in my research, but in all aspects of my life'. But the point is I am going. So when it gets to Friday next week and I sit down for my weekly progress meeting, and my supervisor asks me what I have done, I will be able to confidently state that I attended a university workshop on how to progress, even if I haven't actually progressed at all.
