My sister (and others) have been complaining about the gobs of work they’ve got to get done during exam period. There are papers, projects, and of course, exams. My case is somewhat different. I remember how it seemed all kinds of massive projects and papers were due right before or during exams, and then I would have to suffer through a whole ton of exams. It was a huge weight off my back when it was done.
But now, it’s almost worse. I started working on my current project in September, right after my knee surgery. It’s been going for nine months and now I am finally cramming all of those nine months into ten pages or less, double column.
To put this in perspective for an undergrad: take all the papers, all the projects, all the homework assignments, and all the exams, tests, and quizzes in the last two semesters and make them all due next week. That is the weight of what I am working on. It nags at me every day that I have been working for so long and have nothing to show for it. I think about it in bed before I go to sleep, I think about it when I wake up, I think about it when I’m in the shower, and I think about it when I’m on the bike. As an undergrad and even for the first part of grad school, I got closure incrementally: with periodic assignments and tests and at the finish of each semester when classes end. Closure is now when I get a paper out, and the time span for that seems indefinite.
My first project and paper was faster — it took a semester and a summer. However, I’m still dealing with that project now — I’m going to present it at SECON and when I do, it will almost be a year since the first version of the paper went out.
It seems most undergrads treat papers lightly: “Oh, I can crank out a ten page paper in a few hours and still get an A…” I was the same way — it was spit something out as fast as possible to get it over with, but put enough effort into it to get a decent grade. Now, papers are everything. The paper is how everyone else sees your work. I may have spent the past nine months creating something that could have huge implications for the future of wireless sensor networks, but nobody but my adviser would know about it unless I tell them in a paper. The reviewers will lay the smack down on you if you try to whip out a paper in a matter of hours. Yesterday, I spent six hours writing and got out about five paragraphs. They were five critical paragraphs about the core of what I did, and they had better be comprehensive and understandable from the perspective of an outsider.
I find it hard to tell the story of my project, but I think the difficulty is from inexperience. There are key things that reviewers look for that I must give special attention in addressing. Because of this, there is a pretty rigid way to write a research paper, but even then I find it difficult. It is hard to convey specific algorithmic details, yet be concise and easy to understand. I have to remember the main selling points of my work and refer back to them throughout the paper. For these projects, I find the initial problem discovery, solution design, and implementation to be interesting and sometimes even fun. Enough experience programming and thinking about solutions to problems has helped with that, but I haven’t done much writing.
With time, I imagine writing will get easier. I will know exactly what to do. With my current paper, I’m almost there. I’m almost to the point where I feel good about what I have written and know that everything will turn out okay. I just have to keep working and get it done. Then there will be some closure.
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