Mike Oren.com

I had gone into this semester (foolishly) thinking that my workload would be more reasonable than the spring (when I was taking two sociological theory courses, a research methods course, and trying to conduct research and plan a new course) and this past summer (when I was teaching the course, helping as a meta-mentor/mentor-at-large for the REU program, and conducting my research). My thinking was two stat courses and my research load--I've done worse, no problem. The classes were as expected--nothing to stress out about since I've had enough previous exposure to statistical thinking now. However, I had underestimated the amount of time I would be putting into research this semester.

My first big project was a relatively medium sized one--getting a CHI paper put together (relatively medium-sized because I had actually been putting time into it over the period of a few months). Then came a much larger time sink--I took the lead on writing an NSF grant with no previous experience writing one before (going off of accepted grants and input from the PIs). That ended up being one of the hardest things I have ever written and drained my system quite a bit in the time from mid-September to mid-October I worked on it. Not only that but after I finished it, I had a few class-based deadlines I needed to get back on top of (nothing was turned in late). That said, it was a great learning experience and there are definitely incentives for me if the grant gets accepted (beyond the learning experience). Somewhere in that period I also taught two weeks of a music class (that wasn't a huge time sink but when I had originally agreed to do it, I didn't realize all my time would be getting sunk into grant writing). Both the grant writing and teaching the music course ended up giving me preparing future faculty (PFF) credit, leaving me with just one PFF class left to take and then a teaching methods course in order to earn a graduate certificate in college teaching (so I figured I may as well and enrolled in those courses next semester along with my last sociology course--another advanced methods course).

After that, I planned out three experiments and handed out coding assignments to my fellow research assistants who were assisting me and recovered some energy by working on wrapping up some smaller, side projects then got some research paper reading done. At some point this week or early next the code for two projects should be handed back to me so I can run some pilots. The downtime also gave me time to think about some possible new directions of research and now I finally have a little bit of time to update my blog (I also updated the CV part of my web site the other day).

In other news, my Little Brother (the one assigned to me from volunteering with Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America) seems to have fallen off the radar--I was supposed to hang out with him last weekend but was unable to contact his mom by phone beforehand (I showed up at his apartment anyway but nobody was home). The organization hasn't been able to reach them either. Hopefully they're alright though.