Groundhog Eve

It's February! It thankfully no longer goes completely dark by 5:00pm- we might be on the way out of winter. I know you all at home are experiencing the snowpocalypse winter to end all winters, and I kind of can't believe I'm missing it (though I won't say I wish I was there). Here the weather has been strange in a very different way. Since I've been back it hasn't really felt like winter. It has been almost spring-like in a way. I can't tell if it's lulling me into a false sense of security before it slaps me in the face with winter again or if the light at the end of the winter tunnel is actually getting closer. The downside of that though would be that spring means rain. And this is Wales. And in Wales, when they say rain, they mean RAIN. But I guess we'll just have to wait and see what Punxsutawney Phil has to say tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, now that it's February, this means that Dan and I are mostly on our own for our dissertation project. Our supervisor has taken off for California on study leave for the next 6 months or so. Additionally, her PhD student who was helping us with building our task in the experiment software has also left. Fortunately, Dan and I finished some of the bigger things last week before both Jane and Julia took off so we might not be so badly off. Our e-prime computer task is completely built, all of our experimental documents are written (several forms for participants and our questionnaires) and our ethical approval application has been submitted. Now we just wait for ethics to be approved and then for participants to sign up for our experiment.

Further to project stuff, the first step in our written dissertations (our proposal) is due at the end of next week. This proposal is no longer than a typical essay for a class, but it's not easy to put together. It must consist of an abstract, a lit review, specific statement of our hypotheses, methods, and predicted results, as well as a title page and references section, all comprising no more than 3200 words. That's a whole lot of content in not a lot of space. I'm not entirely sure how we're supposed to make any of the sections complete enough to get good marks in the proposal with such a tight word limit. It should be an interesting 2 weeks to get that figured out.

That's really all I have to report this week. Not so exciting as the last post of my grand London adventures. But hey, I'm here for school I suppose you should hear about some academics once in a while.

Here's hoping for an early spring (you hear that, Punxsy?)