Masterful mess
This week’s theme is about the worst mistake we’ve made. I have a few doozies, but I think I’ll stick to one that caused me to break down and cry in front of my advisor…although the crying wasn’t great, either. I knew I was going to be finishing up my master’s and was trying to decide where to go for my doctorate. Unfortunately, I didn’t know if I was going to be accepted to any of the universities I’d applied to. I did know that my advisor was very willing to keep me on as a doctoral student. With this in mind, I decided to spend the last semester of my master’s program doing something very stupid: taking classes. As I’m prone to doing, I seriously underestimated how much time I would need to write my thesis, and thought I would be fine doing it alongside two classes (and an…
She’s got the look.
When I began writing my master’s thesis, I had a big decision to make: Microsoft Word or LaTeX. I didn’t like the equation formatting in Word, but I could live with it. However, I was at the tail end of a campus thesis editor who HATED LaTeX, and so I was told that I would save myself a lot of heartache if I just went with Word. I also figured that the learning curve was significantly less steep for Word. I was wrong on both counts, and the equation formatting ended up being the least of my concerns. As it turns out, writing a large document in Microsoft Word required me to learn to use settings I wasn’t familiar with. For instance, I had to learn to put pictures in such that they would be recognized by the program as a figure. Then, I had to make a table giving…