My immense discipline and focus has begun to degrade. It started late last week with a couple "social" interactions that included some wine and consequent sleep-ins. While awesome and healthy to see friends and family, and arguably more important than my academic goals in general, I have allowed it to distract me from the matter at hand. I'm on to crazy cutting and editing this week and seemed to have resigned myself to the content that is on paper now, the content that I feel I honestly wrestled with the last couple weeks. But it's time to cut my losses and forget about the potential "nobel-prize-genius" I could include in the papers for this exam if I just worked a tiny bit harder. I am still further distracted as I get excited to wrap up the semester and head back to Alberta for the holidays this coming Friday.
I'm actually okay with this "resignation" because it is important not to be too hard on oneself when producing drafts. Typically in academia you would never just produce something on your own. There would always be checks and balances, supervisory committees, peer-reviewers, older and wiser collaborators to help add to a publication and make it 10 times better, etc. I have thought a lot about trusting in my abilities to produce something of quality by myself, trying to internalise first place ribbons for writing at county exhibitions when I was in elementary school, award winning poetry in high school, almost a decade of A+ university papers, and encouragement and praise for my writing products from various academics over the years. However, while the longitudinal evidence supports the trust I try to have in my capabilities, doubt rears its head time and time again....but alas I think this might be a product of the nature of academia.
I'm actually okay with this "resignation" because it is important not to be too hard on oneself when producing drafts. Typically in academia you would never just produce something on your own. There would always be checks and balances, supervisory committees, peer-reviewers, older and wiser collaborators to help add to a publication and make it 10 times better, etc. I have thought a lot about trusting in my abilities to produce something of quality by myself, trying to internalise first place ribbons for writing at county exhibitions when I was in elementary school, award winning poetry in high school, almost a decade of A+ university papers, and encouragement and praise for my writing products from various academics over the years. However, while the longitudinal evidence supports the trust I try to have in my capabilities, doubt rears its head time and time again....but alas I think this might be a product of the nature of academia.
No comments:
Post a Comment