Howitzer

I think an important skill to have no matter what you are doing is proper time management. I'm struggling with my time management a bit right now. As a first year graduate student, I am supposed to be working half the time, and focusing on classes the other half. In reality, I am doing 80+% of my time on classes. I spend all of Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday working on homework and learning material for classes. Wednesday night is then dedicated to recharging. And that leaves Thursday and Friday when I don't have classes or seminars or whatever to try to do some research. If I have an exam, they are usually on Thursday or Friday. This semester, it looks like my exams are staggered with one another, ie. one exam each week, rather than together. This past week, I spent all of Thursday and Friday on my exam. This all adds up to very little time for me to spend on research.

I'll have to work on being more disciplined in my schedule. I'm also experimenting with going into the office on the weekend to dedicate some time to reading on research related topics. I will monitor this to see how it goes. Hopefully my time management problems are due to adjustment issues here at MIT. I found that another member in my group barely got anything done his first semester here. I think I can get something done this semester, such as at least getting something set up for experiments.