Dear God, how do academics retain their sanity after ploughing through several dozen papers on the same topic?
We don't. We are now all at least slightly insane. I'm currently working my way through a mere 30 papers taking the Morton Thiokol engineering presentations relating to the decision to launch/not launch Challenger and attempting to present the data in a manner which makes it obvious that launching at 31 degrees F would be a Bad Thing - a very useful and (to some of my students at least) interesting data visualisation problem. But by the time I've gone through four or five repetitions of the same background material I need a break.
It's sometimes worth it though; occasionally you'll find a student who is excited by the topic (or at least understands it) and has done a really good job of explaining the topic well and may even show signs of original thought. Those are the moments that make it all worthwhile.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 08:39 am (UTC)We don't. We are now all at least slightly insane. I'm currently working my way through a mere 30 papers taking the Morton Thiokol engineering presentations relating to the decision to launch/not launch Challenger and attempting to present the data in a manner which makes it obvious that launching at 31 degrees F would be a Bad Thing - a very useful and (to some of my students at least) interesting data visualisation problem. But by the time I've gone through four or five repetitions of the same background material I need a break.
It's sometimes worth it though; occasionally you'll find a student who is excited by the topic (or at least understands it) and has done a really good job of explaining the topic well and may even show signs of original thought. Those are the moments that make it all worthwhile.