Honours (sigh)...

Yes, honours is hard. People have been telling me for months that sooner or later I'm going to figure out just how hard it is to do all the fieldwork, lab work, analysis, and writing in the the short amount of time allowed and have a meltdown. I have had three fairly minor, but quite distinct meltdowns over the last couple of weeks. The last one of these meltdowns was by far the worst, but still not bad at all compared to what I know some of my friends at uni have recently gone through.

I now have only 6 weeks left to finish all my fieldwork and lab analysis of the prey and scat samples. That's not long when you consider how much I have to do in that time.

Here's how everything is going at the moment:
I have been getting a good number of observation hours so far, but Orford is still over-represented because it is so much closer than my other sites and the birds are all packed into a small space so I preferred to go to it rather than my other sites when I first started fieldwork. Recently, I have found a method of rather drastically improving my scat sample collection (no I'm not doing anything cruel to the birds - just getting smarter about how to locate the 'jobbies' they are already leaving behind) so that's going well at the moment too. Unfortunately, two of my sites are very heavily Hooded Plover dominated so my observations are skewed in favour of the Hoodies at the moment and the Red-cap observations are falling behind at these sites. There isn't much I can do about that so I'm just focusing on observing the Red-caps at those sites as much as I can and will tailor the statistical stuff to fix the problem later when I've finished fieldwork.

All that sounded fairly positive, didn't it? Nothing to have any meltdowns about so far, right?
Here's the problem:
That's only one aspect of my fieldwork. There are still two other projects that I haven't even been able to start yet! I still need to start (and hopefully complete) a round of nocturnal observations and prey sampling. Both of these have created problems for me as there is some field equipment that I need for each of these projects that I have so far been unable to get. The problem is that with Christmas and New Years and everything eating into all my weeks I have only had time to do my fieldwork and not spend my usual 1 day a week in my office at uni sorting these kinds of things out. My one day this week was spent typing my observation results into my rather massive spreadsheet and trying to find five minutes when Mark was in his office without being on the phone or with one of his post grads to talk things over with him. I didn't manage to find this five minutes until almost 5pm (after I spent 6 hours typing gibberish codes into my spreadsheet and then another couple of hours researching some stuff) by which time the tech staff had left for the night so I couldn't organise anything with them. I'm glad I talked things over with Mark before organising field equipment, though, because he wants me to do things slightly differently to I had planned (and actually for a good, sensible reason for once). Unfortunately, this means that my hands are still tied with regard to starting these other projects until I can get my hands on the required equipment. I hope to resolve this problem on Monday, however.

While things are starting to look a little darker, I'm sure you still cant see any reasons for a meltdown, can you? That's because there isn't one yet.

The problem:
I have been so flat out spending more of my time (by far) away from home doing fieldwork than at home doing other important aspects of my honours degree. Zoology honours degrees require that you submit a Research Proposal. This is a strange document in which you invent a one-year zoological research project on whatever you like (it can be anything at all - doesn't even remotely have to resemble the area your honours project is in) and write a proposal to a funding body for it. Its not easy. Its quite complex and a lot of time and energy goes into it. Its very important for your overall mark at the end of honours. Its due in 3 weeks. I've barely managed to start it. Mark is going away in 2 weeks. Mark wants an almost complete draft early next week.

Panic time!

That's why I had a minor meltdown the other day. I'm surprised it wasn't a more major meltdown considering everything. I'm a little jealous of my counterparts with projects that allow them to live in Hobart full-time and have a little more free-time to work on their research proposals (and got to have the full 2 weeks of Christmas holidays). Anyway, there's not much I can do tonight as I need to go back to uni in the morning (yes Saturday morning at uni) to get some things from my desk so I'll probably work on it at uni for a while. I think now I'll just watch Midsommer Murders for a while, unpack my stuff from being up the coast all week, put on the washing, and get an early night.

Ciao