The last weeks before Christmas are always a bit strange at uni. While the campus is getting more and more quiet since early December because all the undergrads have left already, the labs and offices usually stay busy until the last day. It is hard to get some measurement time on shared equipment, because everybody wants to finalize something before they leave on their holidays. A lot of our international graduate students will be gone for about a month to visit their families overseas. My last student has left today, my supervisor will leave this weekend as well.
For me this hopefully means less distraction. I'm still writing on my huge project proposal and have now additionally accepted the offer to contribute to a larger paper with deadline on my due date. Why did I do that, when writing the proposal is already a lot of work for the next 1.5 months at least? Because it sounded like a low investment high return project. It is on a similar topic as my "doomed" project, so all the tedious literature collection is already done and I "just" have to write the piece. Sometime in between my project proposal writing. Not quite sure when this will be.
The proposal is actually developing quite well, but the progress will certainly slow down over Christmas. Not necessarily because of me taking a long break from it, but because I need quite a bit of information from my host institute to continue - and they will be on a long break.
So right now I hope everything will just fall into place somehow: I'll get the information I need in time, I'll get some feedback from colleagues on my writing in time, I stay physically and mentally fit enough to continue writing, the little one does not arrive earlier as expected (we have a made a deal about that!) and I can hand in my proposal and my paper draft before the family business starts - and I stay relaxed through this whole process. These are my work related Christmas wishes!
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