thisisprofessional - Tumblr blog

[thisisprofessional]

10th of September 2017, 17.53

Just some tracker inspiration for future bujos & planners!

well, I think I’m ready for autumn 🍁🍂 Here’s my September Habit Tracker

[thisisprofessional]

8th of September 2017, 17.50

This is important, guys. 

Motivation is overrated. No amount of motivation would’ve gotten me through hours of my accounting textbook. No “vision” is enough to keep me awake til the crack of dawn on an essay that I don’t even know if the professor will check. Discipline is what determines how far you go. On those days when your cute little list of #goals and vision of yourself 5 years from now aren’t enough, discipline will pull you out of bed and get you to work. I wish I knew this in high school because I thought I couldn’t work without motivation. I wasted so much time trying to find purpose before I realized that working now, albeit blindly, will ensure that I could chase any purpose I discover in the future. Sure, motivation is crucial, but it’s not consistent. It’s not reliable. You can only rely on yourself and your grit. 

[thisisprofessional]

7th of September 2017, 17.48

Not usually a fan of untreated wood and a lot of greenery, but this looks like such a calming corner!

{21/100}

Ahhh yes took like a (1 week??) Hiatus, only because I wasn’t really in a place/mood to be productive (and I didn’t have to be!!)

BUT NOW I AM AND LOOK AT MY DESK 🍃

[thisisprofessional]

6th of September 2017, 17.41

This is pretty much my standard set-up when studying. Tea, pen, paper, and laptop. Summer’s been great but I cannot wait until I can start studying again!

Studying + tea 😊

[thisisprofessional]

5th of September 2017, 11.51

(First time I’ve scheduled a post, does it work?)

Love this kind of cozy ambiance for studying. Studying in cute places is one of the only things I really like about autumn, to be honest. 

Studying in Edinburgh

[thisisprofessional]

4th of September 2017, 11.13

Four days from now I’ll arrive in Prague, where I will be spending my next-to-last semester of university. I*m superexcited about studying there, and these cozy posts also make me feel okay with summer almost being over!

autumn study inspiration aesthetic

[thisisprofessional]

12th of August 2017, 11.00

Did I mention that I’ve been using a home-made planner this year? It’s a sort of mix between a bullet journal and an actual planner. I use it to keep track of my to-dos, as well as the goals I intend to reach, books I want to read, and so on.

The pages above are just a few quick snapshots to show you what it looks like. There of course is a lot of room for improvement, but I’m honestly just playing around with this little project and trying to find out what I like.

Let me know what you think! Anything you like? Anything I could improve? I'd be delighted to hear some opinions!

[thisisprofessional]

5th of April 2017, 07.01

Early morning today! It’s such a lovely feeling to be up bright and early to get things done sometimes. Standard set-up; tackling a course in Organization and Leadership right now, which isn’t too bad. Econometrics, on the other hand…

[thisisprofessional]

17th of March 2017, 21.13

Sooo I’ve been busy. So busy, in fact, that while I’ve entered tumblr a few times and ended up liking some posts, I have not quite gotten around to posting anything on my blog for a while. However, I could not let this little beauty of a text slip into my likes, only to be forgotten there. 

Here’s to hoping that this will be the first of many posts for the rest of my university career!

A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:

When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time I’d tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other way–lots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).

But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.

So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors… I’m not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)

So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that I’d only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.

But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.

So I gave him that summary, and then asked–since he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesis–what his research was on.

“Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t understand it.”

Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one game–a game of ‘let’s talk about what we’re passionate about!’– and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my research–and he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, I’m sorry, it’s hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldn’t possibly understand his work.

Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate student–normally undergrads and graduate students couldn’t be roommates, but we’d been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically… in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)

(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)

Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, “He made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.”

And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, “If he can’t explain his research to you, then he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”

Now I hesitated, because I’d be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldn’t dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, “Look, I’ve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?”

And I said, “Genetic algorithms–that is, self-optimizing algorithms–for prioritization, specifically for scheduling.”

“Right,” she said. “You couldn’t code them because you’re not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone can’t explain it like that, it isn’t a problem with you as a person. It’s a problem with them. They either don’t understand it as well as they think they do–or they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.”

So. There.

If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away… here is what I have to say: maybe it isn’t you who is the idiot.

[thisisprofessional]

3rd of December 2016, 15.57

Sorry for the utter lack of updates! I’ve been incredibly busy. That is reflected in the A I got for my one course and the B in the other (although I was certain I’d fail at least the latter course)! Both these pictures are rather old, but I think they represent my general mood lately, simplistic and comfortable. Hope you guys are all doing good. Let’s get this year over with!

[thisisprofessional]

undefined

15th of October 2016, 20.58

Useful day today! I think I did well on my exam, and I just finished a 19-page lab report (some minor formatting aside). Useful Saturday! Tomorrow I’ll start studying for my next exam, but for now I’m taking the rest of the night off.

[thisisprofessional]

14th of October 2016, 17.44

Tomorrow I’ve got my first exam of the year. Not superexcited. I feel like it could go either way, because there is a lot of math on the exam and I think I understand most of it, but I might also be terribly mistaken and end up using wrong formulas all over the place. Oh well, no use worrying about it quite yet; I still have a few hours to study!

[thisisprofessional]

23rd of September 2016, 08.15

Two days ago, I missed my train. Next one wouldn’t arrive for another three hours, so I made my way to the local library to catch up on some reading! Was very peaceful, despite the windowseats being taken and having to sit in the middle of some isle. But hey, being surrounded by books is not something I generally complain about!

[thisisprofessional]

16th of September 2016, 08.37

Just realized I never posted this picture! My friend and I had a pizza/studydate at uni on Monday, going over some basic statistics. Was surprisingly useful and the pizza was yummy!

[thisisprofessional]

7th of September 2016, 17.25

Bought a self-adhesive blackboard today! Should help with planning events outside of school. Will have to find a way to make it look better, but this is a good start!

[thisisprofessional]

30th of August 2016, 18.31

Finally back to uni! The first day of my second year was celebrated with pizza for lunch, and now I’m going to see if I can still study with my standard set-up. The coming few weeks I’ll be working on Business Statistics, as well as on Intermediate Microeconomics and Mathematical Economics. Hoping for the best.

I hope you guys have had a good summer!

[thisisprofessional]

30th of June 2016, 20.07

Going to set my alarm to ring at 6AM tomorrow, for the third day in a row. Might as well start before uni, sometimes building a habit takes time and I want to have it in my routine before I need it!