Student blogs

I hope you all are having a wonderful, warm, and winsome May so far. In light of a very busy thesis writing period, I am sharing a snippet of how a typical week as a thesis-writing student looks like! I’ll be sharing some of my daily routines, tasks, and activities–both related and unrelated to thesis–that I attempted to balance throughout the week. 

Monday

I usually start my week off very slowly. As I am not a morning person, I tend to get up anywhere between 0830 and 0930. After heading out to the office, I start working by 1045AM. While I sometimes have a to-do list prepared on Sunday evening, this was not the case this week. 

I like spending 5-10 minutes reviewing my “deliverables” of the day and week before tackling the tasks. This week, I focused on finishing the discussion section of my thesis, refine my introduction and results section, reformatting my tables, and checking my codes to ensure that the variables are correctly defined. To start off the week, I began refining my introduction section. 

In the afternoon, I decided to forcefully take breaks with some of my classmates. Fortunately, my close friends are conveniently writing their thesis in the same department as me. So it is very easy to meet up! After a nice little chat (a “yapping session” if you will), we head back into our little office spaces to chip away at our thesis. I left the office by 5:45 PM to make it to karate training on time. Mondays are sparring days! I think it is a good way to release my pent up frustrations by punching sandbags (and people). I also always enjoy taking the bus to my dojo to people-watch, listen to music, and relax. After training, I come home around 9PM, eat a simple dinner, and then go to bed around 1AM. 

Tuesday

This morning, I felt spontaneous and decided to go for a very quick morning run before heading to campus. At the office, I decided to spend the first 1.5 hours or so doing student union/association-related tasks. (Yes, I don’t always do thesis-related stuff at the office). As I am a treasurer for one of the committees of the Medical Student Union (MF), I have to regularly check and approve any invoices accumulated in the past days or weeks. There were some issues with some invoices so this took a bit longer than anticipated. I start by refining my results section before taking a break. 

During my lunch break, I also spent some time drafting a graphical design for an upcoming event for Queerolinska, another student association that I am a board member of. I finished off editing my results section and moved onto cleaning parts of my code. Then, I decided to get started with the discussion section. 

I was about 2-3 paragraphs in when I called it a day to meet up with Mina, one of the bloggers in the DA team. We decided to spend most of our evening exploring the snack aisles of a supermarket selling foreign candies, while also catching up. We were both very indecisive and in awe of the snacks. At the end, we ended up spending close to an hour inside the store.

After parting ways, I spent around 40 minutes finishing off the code cleaning before sending it over to my supervisor. 

Wednesday

I have designated days where I stay longer at the office to make myself complete a task within that day.  As I had quite a few things to do, I decided that this day will be my “long day”. I wanted to be done with two parts of the discussion, debug some of my code, and reformat my tables. 

I took a late lunch break after finishing one part of my discussion and debugging, around 3:30PM. On these long days, I tend to just eat alone because I am 1. Too lazy to ask anyone and 2. It’s often at odd hours. I do end up meeting some friends from the other Global masters programme, including Mina, who we chat for maybe 5-10 minutes when refilling our coffees in the break room. After another session of writing, I leave the office around 8:30PM or so. 

I then force myself to go to the gym, because it is back day today! Basically, it’s one bus ride away, and the gym I attend has a sauna, so that alone is motivation for me to go. When I go late enough, I see one of my classmates there and we end up catching up, which is yet another motivation for me to get in a good evening workout. Generally, I find gym sessions to be therapeutic, as I can focus on the mind-body connection during each exercise. 

After getting home quite late (past 11PM), I wind down for the day after a quick protein replenishment. 

Thursday

On Thursdays, I have to get up a little earlier because our research unit has a weekly meeting at 10AM. I’m always a little grumpy for the first 5 minutes entering the building for that reason. The unit meetings we have are, to me, reminiscent of journal clubs. Members of the unit present any ongoing or completed research projects they have been working on. Though I’m always a bit overwhelmed to ask any questions, I am always amazed by my research group members. Extending my knowledge on methods we have learned in class and even learning about new ones, have therefore been very eye-opening, albeit nerve wrecking for me!

After the meeting, I decide to refine my introduction until I have lunch with my classmate. We share a relaxing hour chatting and getting ice cream before parting ways. This afternoon, I also had a rather long meeting with my supervisor. We mostly went through some minor issues of the code I wrote in detail. He also took the time to answer questions I had about the theoretical framework used in the thesis. I left shortly after the meeting ended to attend yet another karate class to de-stress. I did some laundry and ate dinner before calling it a day. 

Friday

I gathered with some classmates for a thesis workshop hosted by our programme directors in the morning, to review an old thesis written by a past student. I found the session very helpful as we got to apply the grading criteria used to assess our theses in a group work/discussion format. More than anything though, it was very fun to get back together as a class again! We enjoyed some little moments chatting, catching up, and ranting to each other about the process that morning. Moments like these made me appreciate all the lecture time we spent together during the last three semesters. Also, I was reminded of the importance of maintaining contact with, and spending time with your coursemates during the thesis period, as this little workshop session energized me for the rest of the day. 

I returned to the office in the early afternoon to write up the remaining parts of my discussion and introduction. Per usual, this took way longer than expected. I went back and forth between synthesizing findings, and referring back to past literature. I think it gets a bit much for your brain after a while! Luckily, I ended up chatting about fun, non-thesis topics with my co-supervisor. This was a great distraction from my brain being fried by all the literature I attempted to read. 

I went straight to my classmate´s place to catch up and eat a light (girl) dinner. We shared a lot of laughs and stories from the past week(s) for hours! After the lively evening, I was unfortunately consumed by a sudden feeling of panic. This was because I had forgotten to revise and re-run some code in the analysis. I ended up staying way past my anticipated bedtime, but what’s new? Perhaps it was worth it, as the results were not affected in the end, meaning I could now fully relax for the weekend. 

Saturday

This day was fully packed! I was back on campus at 09:30 AM to prepare for a day-long event called VPR ( Valborg pub round), that the Program committee is a part of. Basically, we participated in a themed pub round including more than 30 different student pubs in Stockholm. We did last minute decorations, and I was in charge of cooking the food served at our pub. As we had more guests than we anticipated, I was running around for a good 6 hours to cook or get more groceries! After hastily cleaning up, we rushed over to participate in the pub round. We spent the rest of the evening at Stockholm University and KTH (Technical College). It was a very chaotic and fun night overall! 

Sunday

After an exhausting Saturday, I slept in and relaxed most of the day. I spent time with a classmate and a family member. Overall, I took the time to not think or talk about the thesis for the day. But I ended up making a small to-do list for the upcoming week, as I needed to get quite a few things done and remain focused until the thesis submission in less than 14 days!

Final remarks

In contrast to what many of you might expect, the thesis writing process is not linear. By reading this blog, I hope you got a better sense of a slightly less-glorified, less organized, and realistic week of a Masters student in their last semester!