Cognitive Foundations is an open-source, collaborative textbook edited by Dr. Celeste Pilegard. Last fall, she brought me onto her team as a subject matter expert in order to revamp “Chapter 6: Memory in Context” in preparation for the release of the second edition of the textbook. I did a lot of revising of the current material (nearly all of it overlapped with the material I taught in my PSYC 144 Memory & Amnesia course) and did a good amount of original writing as well.
“Stay in the chair.” It’s one of the mantras used within writing groups at UCSD in order encourage progress on long writing projects. Below are some tips for staying in the chair. The list is broken down by the type of issue impeding focus too—super nifty.
Truthfully, this is one of the most helpful lists I’ve been given for productivity in graduate school.
Below are some writing tips from a graduate writing retreat hosted by UC San Diego’s Teaching + Learning Commons. These tips are centered around how to overcome resistance to writing when you find yourself doing (or thinking about doing) avoidance behaviors.
Data science proficiency goes hand-in-hand with Ph.D-level research. For most of us, however, we don’t enter graduate school with strong programming skills. Instead, we’re likely thrown into a two-in-one, programming-and-statistical-methods course during our first year of graduate school, using any number of possible languages (MatLab, R, SPSS, etc.). Personally, I’m of the belief that learning R is invaluable. I think the learning curve is steeper compared to other languages, but as you develop proficiency and confidence, I find it to be a dynamic language that can do most-anything you’ll need within the scope of a Ph.D program. (A bonus: It’s heavily used in industry as well.)
Since proficiency comes with practice, I take coding workshops as frequently as they’re available. It solidifies what I already know and keeps me from forgetting methods that I may not use regularly when doing my own research and analyses. Sometimes, I’ll learn more efficient ways to do things too. Also, learning from different teachers has the benefit of having concepts explained in a different ways—things that seemed ‘fuzzy’ when explained by one professor may be crystal clear when explained in a different manner.
I advocate for a general literacy across a few languages — after all, you’ll have little control over the format of materials sent over by colleagues — but here I thought I’d focus on my favorite beginner-level resources for R programming.
During UCSD’s Pathways to Ph.D event, some of the panelists shared resources which helped them navigate the graduate school application process.
Thank you to everyone who attended and to those who made this event possible.
It’s been six months since I wrote my last blog post on working from home during a pandemic. I highly suggest reading that first — I biasedly think it was good advice — but here are an additional five, concrete steps that I use to help me work from home.
As all of us in academia know, the writing process rarely begins with a blank Word document titled, “rough draft.” It begins with an idea, notes jotted into a notebook, a lot of (annotated) reading, study design, data collection, and a whole host of other steps before the aforementioned Word document even exists. Large-scale writing projects can be daunting, not only because they require a lot of hard work, but because organizing oneself can be challenging.
Before UCSD went fully remote, I attended a graduate writing retreat to make progress on my qualifying paper. The writing retreat, hosted by the Teaching + Learning Commons (TLC), is meant for those with large writing projects (e.g. qualifying papers, dissertations, etc.). It was my first time attending a writing retreat. I expected attendees to spend the entire time quietly working, but the TLC structured the time such that students first learned how to efficiently work. Below is one of the most-helpful handouts that they gave to us.
This week was the UC Psychology Teaching & Learning conference, hosted by faculty at UC San Diego, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis and UCLA. From the conference webpage, “[The conference] is designed for psychology instructors at all levels who are interested in developing teaching strategies and learning about pedagogy research.”
This was an informative event and gave attendees numerous tools on how to improve the classroom experience (especially in a virtual setting). Listed below are some of the helpful things I learned over the course of these two days:
Adding to the plethora of “here’s how I do it!” posts online, this is how I (attempt) to work from home during the COVID-19 lockdown. This post is not meant to instruct you on how to maximize productivity—personally, I think there are more important things to worry about right now—rather, it’s meant to validate the emotions of those feeling similarly and (hopefully) provide someone with a new coping strategy.