Uptime
I’m certainly becoming frustrated with the system on which grad school seems to be based. The general philosophy, it seems, is to toss a plurality of information at our brains and hope that some of it sticks in a meaningful way. We are expected to accept, learn, process, and produce at a rate unheard-of.
Such a thing is out of my comfort zone. I have a tendency to ponder to a fault. When I get something, it becomes deeply entrenched in my mind, but as of late, I require a lot of time in the process.
The model of grad school and my M.O. are frequently at odds. For example, I just wrote a hurried critique on a 2007 study of automated retrieval system evaluation in the absence of user input. The article, though laden with complicated statistics, has at its core a proposal which could revolutionize how we process system efficacy.
Were I able to leave my analysis of possible future research alone, I’d be able to move on to my next assignment which is due tomorrow, but I can’t get out of my head the purported correlation of that article’s system with measures of user satisfaction, implications for information retrieval at large, how user experience interacts with satisfaction….in short, I keep pondering while syllabi threaten to leave me behind in my reverie.
It’s not that I feel incompetent, just that my maximum ratio of uptime to downtime is uncomfortably different from that demanded of me.
