Be Prepared!

Though there are many life lessons that can be learned from the research writing article , the one that sticks out to me is the old Girl Scout adage of ‘Be prepared’.  

I don’t need to tell anyone here about how daunting the project was, or about sleepless nights spent frantically editing figures as these are fairly common experiences.  However, I’m sure each of us had our own unexpected issues pop up.  Some of these issues were probably avoidable and can be used in the future.  For instance, I learned that you should check the page limit before you write the whole assignment and go significantly over because you like run-on sentences. Others could not be predicted, like a computer crash that destroys your all your figures a few days before the deadline.  (The life lesson here is back up your files.)

No matter what the problem I encountered along the way, I found that certain precautions helped me get over these hurdles. One was starting early, as that gave me a time buffer close to the deadline.  It also gave me time to fully develop the story I wanted to tell in my research article, as that changed drastically through the writing process. Another was going to lecture, which gave a lot of incredibly useful information for explaining processes and figuring out exactly what was happening with our data.  Though it pains me to admit, the homework was also very helpful in starting the research article and figuring out exactly what to include.  Finally, office hours were a great way to clarify information, check my conclusions, and figure out how to represent data.

With this information and these resources, any problem that came up was more or less manageable.  Overall, though the writing process was stressful and rocky at times, it was okay with the proper preparation. My old troop leader would be proud.