Thesis thoughts...

Taking a few minutes to download the entire contents of my thesis directory onto the laptop this morning so that I may take my schoolwork home. I can certainly be more productive there, and won't feel the need to kick off at 5 o'clock as I would here in this comfortable but lonely windowless room.

In case you're interested, been working all week on the analyses for my first thesis chapter/paper, which I hope to present at the marine mammal conference this December. After several months of wrangling and revision I finally came up with a more meaningful, inspiring and unifying theme to the thesis back in June. Analyses haven't really changed much from my earlier theme, but my sense of purpose and belief in the utility of my work has vastly improved. The problem is that after six years working on this type of thing I'm still a bit of a skeptic where it comes to using technology to infer animal behavior; my major breakthrough was finding a central theme which asked our ecologically significant question while accounting for the unknowns which arise from technique. This was a big deal for me and the greatest benefit so far of returning to school. Besides the opportunity to work with talented scientists and assume greater control of my work, of course...

As this (gratifying) 25-minute download of my work continues, I run out of things to say. Ta.