Not an undergrad, yet not a postdoc
The progression from undergraduate to postgraduate was surprisingly smooth and devoid of significant milestones (apart from attending my graduation ceremony). Instead I find myself marking time with small incremental increases in my ability to make independent judgments.
I hope it means I’m getting better at being an academic. I still don’t know a lot and I find myself reverting to my clueless undergraduate self but by and large those events have lessened.
Sometimes I think I’m doing very little work, especially when my experiments just refuse to work. It’s a good thing then that I have been compiling all my data into one file — when I look back at it, I find myself confronted with evidence of work being done and completed. Even so, I keep feeling that I can do more. I have no indication of how much work is satisfactory from my supervisors but so far they seem content with the work I have been producing.
Between working on my various experiments I’ve been trying my best to keep up with my blog. How does anyone maintain an informative, clear and compelling blog on the side of a full time job? It’s been hard owing to the lack of time and motivation to work on it. I still want to write the reviews for my blog but at this point it seems that the part that I used to enjoy the most (photography) has turned into a chore that pains me when I do it.
In the end the blog is just another hobby in my long list of hobbies. From cross stitching to knitting to crocheting to photography to baking to (almost) polymer clay modelling to blogging and back to photography.
I am however, proud that while I have many hobbies I have never given any of them up permanently. They ebb and flow in and out of my life as my needs and abilities change.
Lately the blog has become less of a hobby and more of a competitive publishing endevour. The blogging sphere is intensely saturated and I hate that I’ve turned my hobby into a competitive sport. After all, what is the point of publishing a review if no one is there to read it. Which brings me to another thought, if a tree falls in a forest but no one is there to see it, does that mean it never fell? After all, until it is perceived we can assume that the tree never fell. In the same vein, if I publish a review and no one reads it, isn’t it just the same as if I never wrote it?
Shouldn’t I just take the high road and publish for my own sake? Then what is the point of providing full and detailed photographs and descriptions when I know it already?
The blog is probably for my own vanity.
Probably.
