PhD_the other half

Source:  johns5marathons.wordpress.com   After putting on several kilos during my field survey in Bangladesh (due to stress, over work and less sleep) when I came back to Edinburgh on the last day of May, I felt devastated. I needed to get back to healthy life style to survive, to finish my PhD. I tried going to gym during my first year, but it was a total wastage of money as I ended up not continuing as many other people of the world do. So I discarded that idea first time it popped up in my brain. Luckily I came across a mobile app called C25K in NHS website which coaches a person to run 5 kilometre from a couch potato. To my utter surprise I continued with the program. Do you believe I finished it? The person who used to lose her breath just after running a minute can run for 30 minutes now at one go. Of course, its not easy to run for 30 minutes and every time just after 10 minutes I think I wont be able to continue and after 15 minutes I start panting and feel its...

When I started my PhD here people told everything about work during the PhD like working long hours or even during week end, working hard during the Government Holidays when even the school office is closed and access is limited to the University... bla bla. The thing that I never heard of is planning a break during this long journey. So I took it for granted that I am married to the PhD for this three years and should not think of anything else. But soon I became tired, started nagging with my husband for holidays and at one time I freaked out. It was just after three months during Christmas. Me and my husband were not really used to the idea of planning the breaks long before and found it impossible to go somewhere as the ticket prices were untouchable at the moment. So I got rotten at home for those few days of vacation. I carried loads of books to home which remained untouched until the day when the school reopened. I am from a country where people generally don't plan ...

I attended a workshop on 'beating writer's block' though I knew I did not yet reach to that stage of writing to face writer's block. I have been procrastinating about writing a journal article for a long time, more than two years now and then I put it aside completely thinking its not the priority at the moment. The priority is finishing the PhD. But you know its not write, publishing is the key to be in academia after my PhD. Even if not the journal article I have been procrastinating about writing 1000 words everyday. I have been telling myself since the beginning of my PhD that I will start tomorrow. May be I am the only one who is being so stupid during her PhD. And you are thinking that reading my blog is a mere waste of time. But wait, I might have to tell something to the people who think like me. Well, as I have started my scary third year, I don't have any choice but write. I could not yet finish the whole chunks of data analysis. I am doing mixed method...

I have been away from blogging for quite a long time. But I want to at least report on what I was doing in the past week on every week end. This is a start on that. I have passed a really really busy time last week and also a very productive (!) - well I can't say that but I have been in the process and I got really good feedback from my colleagues. 1) Tutoring: I was engaged in tutoring on Monday morning. I am really enjoying tutoring in the art and design studio. I am being able to learn many things- how to engage the students in the process.  - The students of Architecture are required to be given an introduction to the design process (research process as a part of it). - They might be exposed to how they will apply their art and design exercises in future design through some presentations. - The students should be encouraged to use their sketchbook and the sketchbooks will be a part of the submission. It is needed to be ensured. 2) Presentation in the PhD LA Seminar...

Yes! The third year of my PhD has officially started. This should be the last year of my PhD and therefore I will be living my last moments in Edinburgh may be. In that case its high time I plan for this year to work to my fullest and to enjoy it to the greatest too. It is heart aching to think how fast time flies and this year will pass may be in the blink of an eye. I want to make the time frozen, I want to live a bit more of this year. I want this 12 months to be 18 months long. How can it be! Its difficult to plan for a year, but I can set my goals for this semester only- September to December. Yes this will give me some more time to think about my further plans for work and joy. The goals or I will say my 'wishes' are here- Continue with the writing retreat. Arrange it sometimes so that it happens at least once in a fortnight. Make the 'research ADDA' a regular thing. Plan and give time. Establish the morning routine. Don't be hard on yourself but l...

Groupfie: Hanis (top photo; from left Hanis, Sharifah, Azlina, Matluba (me ;) ), Nik and Roxana) We, the PhD Landscape Architecture students of ESALA meet fortnightly for an informal gathering in any available place nearby our office. The venue is mostly the board room or if not available then in ECA cafe or Cafe Truva just opposite Evolution house. We have named it 'Research ADDA'. Adda is a Bengali word which means an assemblage of friendly talkers, most popular is adda over tea at a road side shop named 'tong er dokan'. The name says it all as we want this meeting very informal where PhD students of Landscape Architecture (in fact not limited to LA only, there are students from Architecture and also Moray House School of Education too) will share with each other the challenges they are facing, the goals they are achieving, the rewards they are having from their supervisors and bla bla bla.. Its talking about everything (read 'research' ;) ) about a PhD s...

I have data for three different groups- Treatment group and Comparison group is the treatment school and the comparison school itself. First I was confused whether I need to test the normality for individual groups or all the samples together.(??) Later on I have run the analysis for all the samples together later on . (Kolmogorov-Smirnov test showed not significant results for individual groups, yet sample size is less than 30) EXAM SCORE DATA: In the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test the results are not significant for science and religion course before intervention and the maths score after intervention i.e. these data are normal. The scores for all other elements are significant which proves non-normality of the data. However, the skewness and kurtosis value for all the elements of the exam scores are within the acceptable range of normality that is -2 to 2 (George and Mallery 2010). The lowest value is -1.320 and highest is 0.873. The average skewness value is 0.316 and the...