Wednesday, November 19, 2014

The life of graduate student

Okay, scrap that title. I won't talk about the "avarage" life of graduate students in the world. Not even in my university. I didn't assess that in appropriate samples and appropriate method. Oh God.. Should we talk about method? Why not about the design and its statistic as well? Great.. my mood just ruined because of the research talk.

Back to my intention, I just want to "complaint" about my life in here. But posting "my life" as a title is so selfish that I have no intention to. So lets check how my life looks like for the past week.

Last week I got a constant headache, or migraine, with various level of pain (why... why it sounds leading to statistic agaiiiin..?) . I mean, sometimes the pain made me can't think and really hope the painkiller could shut down the pain receptor, and some other time I could just ignore the pain. If we categorised the pain in a certain levels, let say level 1 to 5 where the most painful one is level 5, than during the last week I got level 2 to 4. When it was at level 4, I can't do nothing and take painkiller. But if it was around level 2 or 3, I still can walk around and did my activities with the feeling of carrying big stone on my head.

What about my activities? As an MSc student (no one said "graduate student" in here, we are not even graduated :p) that working on a thesis, we usually work with one of chair-group (department) in the university, and we got a work station (bench and computer) to work on and are expected to work in our station for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week,  between 7am to 10pm. Or at least that was what they told me when I started my thesis in this department. And that was also what I did for the first phase of my thesis. We could say that I am now in my last stage of MSc study as well as thesis work, but that could lead to another story..

So back to the topic.. Last week I did't really go to "my office" everyday and work for 8 hours. I still have some afternoon classes, so I came late in the morning to "my office" and leave at lunch hour and continue to my afternoon class. On the weekend, I went to "the centre", for some groceries shopping, and do nothing afterward. Just resting for the whole weekend. Back to Monday, I show up late morning again in my office and the circle re-started. At this stage seeing friend was only on the way out or in the building. Had some short conversation, and continue with our own -look-a-like- life. It looks boring, but in reality it IS boring.. :D

The excitement was only when you find your data fit you hypothesis or met all assumption in the statistic test. The reading and writing part also (sometimes) quite interesting.. or stressing... And the joy when you have (or you think you have) a free time...

Okay.. that was a small picture of my life as MSc student in Wageningen during thesis period. Any other period, my life was so much better. But probably in the future I also see that even this period also seems much better than any other hard period that I could have in the future. So just enjoy the this moment.