Saturday, December 20, 2014

Fall Quarter: A Post Mortem

Holy moly; finals week on the quarter system is way different than finals week on semesters.

These past seven days have been a maelstrom of crappy sleep, strained eyes, frozen mathematica notebooks, and far too much caffeine. Balancing studying for my own finals with massive amounts of grading and proofreading (of course we'd get proofs back on Tuesday) was tricky, but now it's over and I can breathe.

At least, of course, until the winter quarter starts. But until then, I am going to bask in the success of having a quarter of grad school under my belt. There were times where all seemed lost, but looking back on it all, I think I've set my self up well for what's to come.

Happy holidays.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Aaaand Exhale

After ordering my bagel from the coffee cart, I figured I'd have enough time to upload all of the constituent parts of our revised manuscript before it was done being toasted. Boy was I wrong.

After uploading the raw TeX file and the .bbl, I got kicked out of the upload form. Oh well, no problem, right? I log back in and am told that my revised manuscript is submitted pending approval of the compiled draft. Oh dear.

So at this point, it's after midday on the west coast which means it's almost time to go home on the east coast which is where the editorial office is. I ring them up but there's no answer. Did I mention today was the deadline to upload our revisions?

At this point, my bagel is cold and soggy, I've been sitting on the ground for almost a half hour, and I'm starting to lose it. I finally get a human on the phone and they inform me that the figures I uploaded weren't jiving with the TeX compiler they have. No one knows why I can't upload things anymore, but we get the necessary files in over email and get the revised manuscript approved. Phew.

Now that the paper is truly out of our hands, I feel relief but I also miss the project already. Classes are going to really infringe on research time next quarter, and I suppose that the finality of getting the revision in makes me realize that I'm going to miss the madness one inevitably has to deal with when doing science.

Anywho, I hope the editor enjoys our revisions. I really like our paper and think it's gonna be a hit.

Cheers.