Pressure is for tyres… and Master’s students

It is my final week here in the IRRI office and my head is reeling at how quickly the time has flown by!

My time in this office was nothing at all like I expected. The part-time jobs I have had throughout college have all been fast-paced, on my feet hauling heavy loads all around the place. Even though my work placement for my undergraduate was also desk based I worked remotely, so even then I had extra tasks to get me up an moving (i.e taking care of my dogs and making my family lunch) to break the monotony when I wasn’t on site measuring methane outputs. This summer was a whole other animal compared to any previous work I’ve done.

This experience has taught me lots.

First of all I may not be the ideal person to do five 9-5 days at a desk, and I am glad to have figured this out. I feel like work placement is the perfect setting to find these things out about yourself, and I realized I need to be on my feet to work happy. So it seems the farming blood is still strong in my veins even though I have been a city dweller for the past five years! The need to be outside was remedied easily on my trip to see AWD sites though, so it’s easy to reach a happy medium.

Second, my team-work skills have been given a good boost. Something about the language barrier has definitely been a factor in this, wherein I need to think carefully about what I want to say in the most straightforward way possible to communicate, and listen very carefully/patiently.

Third, I needed to join a gym. Don’t have the added benefit of heavy lifting and dashing around that I normally get during my summers in hotels! (And I snack to much sitting at a desk.)

The fact I have been left to my own devices much of the time was great, though it does have its pros and cons. I generally do work better with minimal inputs until I ask for more. Having my host supervisor in the same office space has been especially useful for this, compared to other CCAFS students here in Vietnam (that need give notice in advance for meetings) I can just walk across the room whenever! 😅

My aim this final week is to fill out my discussion chapter and polish up my results some more. Doesn’t sound too intimidating but I have to be honest I can’t help but run off on tangents into little things I notice about my data, and those Google searches really eat up a lot of time!

Discussing my results has proven to be more difficult than I anticipated. Like I said the amount of avenues I can go down is abundant, but the dead-ends they can come to is just as many.

I have come to an impasse in some of my interpretations which led to me needing more data. This has sent me back to my methodology and results to squeeze in the relevant data to make my point valid.

Sound convoluted? It is. And I’m sure I could’ve made it easier on myself, but where’s the fun in that?

But in any case I am sure by the end of the week my thesis should for all intents and purposes be complete. Ready for me to reread and rip apart again as I edit 😂