My primary accomplishment this week was narrowing down topics for my ultimate project. I was deciding between something to do with how education was handled and something to do with women's work during the war, and am leaning towards the latter.
Another, albeit much smaller, accomplishment was identifying some graduate programs for exactly I want to do. I still need to explore them further, but it is comforting knowing I have some options.
A more personal accomplishment was trying Thai food for the first time at the dinner with the graduate students. I learned that it wasn't for me, but I'm still proud I ordered an actual Thai dish and not just chicken nuggets off the kids menu.
The biggest factor preventing me from doing my best work this week was the lack of independent work time. I finally narrowed down an idea for my project, but was given no time this week to expand on it. While I found most, if not all, of the lectures useful, this was a factor preventing me from making progress on the project.
Related to that, but a separate factor, is not knowing what the expectations for the program are. Specifically in understanding what the work expectations outside of our normal 9-5 days, if there is one. During a regular class, I would expect to have work to do outside of the normal class period, but I am unsure if the same thing applies here or at this point in the program.
A more personal factor preventing me from doing my best work is not providing myself any structure for the evenings, so that I end up being bored in the evenings. I am endeavouring to fix this in the for next week(s) by working on my GRE practice book a little each day.
Between the multiple lectures this week, I learned a wide variety of details. Perhaps one of the more interesting was the lecture about metadata, especially the part about how to find and correct errors using the tools already existing in Excel.
It was also very useful to learn about Zotero. I didn't know that citation managers were a thing, so it was particularly useful to have a walk-through tutorial of one.
Finally, it was very educational to be able to talk with Sean about the realities of graduate school. His comment about knowing if academia is right for you less than a year in your chosen program was very insightful.