Module 2 Report

Alternatively Titled: Second Time's the Charm (?)
Writing the Mod 2 report was hard. There's no better way to put it. It was really, really, really hard. But so was writing the Mod 1 report, and that time, I had beyond no idea what I was doing. Here's a run down of some things that changed between then and now:

What I did better:

• I went to office hours! I asked for help!!! Anybody who knows me understands that this is a pretty big step. Often times, I would just rather sit in my room chipping away at my work and feeling like a complete idiot when something didn't come 100% naturally to me. It's one of my worst traits as a student, and I was happy to take some steps to overcome it.
• I carved out (a lot) of time to work on the report. Last time, I tried to do things more incrementally, but found that separating all my work into small, half hour pockets of time between psets led to one very long, moderately painful day of sewing together all the pieces that I suddenly realized didn't make sense at the end. This time, I devoted chunks of hours at a time over several days, and I found it worked very well.
• I made all my figures before drafting the remainder of the results section that hadn't been completed in daily assignments. I found that this helped me to understand the "story" I was telling in my paper a lot better.

What I did worse:

• In mod 1, we were given a built in revision period. In mod 2, I just assumed it would suffice to give myself a couple hours after I'd finish to look everything over. It didn't. I wished I'd carved out an entire day or two to go over everything so that once it was down to the wire, I didn't feel like there might have been things I could've tweaked or rewritten, if only I'd had more time.

So, there you have it! Two modules down, one to go.