Back in the Game

The Seven-Month Change My Life Challenge, Week 9

Apologies for dropping off the face of the internet for a while there. All I can say is ‘dissertation deadline’ and hopefully that’s self-explanatory… more on that note below!

1. Training for the half-marathon: ⭐️⭐️
   Despite the dissertation-induced chaos and panic of the last few weeks, I’m doing… okay? I managed four runs last week, but they were all super short.

2. Master’s dissertation: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
   It is done!!!!! See below for more.

3. Look after the space I live in: ⭐️
   I’ve made another couple of Vinted sales, but other than that, things have been pretty bare-minimum. I’m gradually catching up from the dissertation panic that meant I did even less than usual.

4. Screen time below 3 hours: ⭐️
   It was almost 5 hours last week. I don’t even want to talk about it.

5. Read the books I already own: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
   Doing really well on this one. Around the end of the dissertation I had a real case of the ‘shoppies’ but managed not to funnel it into books, despite spending a lot of time in the Waterstones Cafe. A ‘what I read in August’ post is coming to you later this week.

6. Draft 1 of the Unhinged Fiction Project: ❌
   Nothing doing here. The dissertation has been more important - but I can’t wait to get back to it.

7. Knitting progress: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
   Baby G’s blanket is so nearly finished! Just a couple of rows left before I start the final border, and then I’ll get to darn in the edges. I’ve been hankering lately for a slouchy beret style hat (blame all the Y2K fashion around) and I might have tripped and made an order of yarn on the Rainbow Heirloom website…

Weekly Focus: Master’s dissertation

It’s done! It’s done!!! I don’t want to go too hard with celebration, given that I won’t know how it scored until the end of November, but I’m proud that it’s finished - and with it, I’ve completed my Master’s degree! I have a week off, and then induction week for my PhD starts next Monday.

One thing that’s changed since my first academic rodeo is that all submissions are digital now. When I was in undergrad, we would submit an online version of our work for plagiarism checks, but we also had to hand in a paper version. Now it’s entirely online (and we upload directly to Turnitin), but that didn’t stop me printing out the cover sheet of my dissertation and paper-clipping it to a sheaf of notes for the mandatory “Here’s my thesis!” photo.

My dissertation title was: Nature as Countable, Controllable, and Commodifiable: Language Use in the Environment Act 2021. Essentially, I’m digging into this piece of legislation which was passed a few years ago, and seeing how the words in it perpetuate existing narratives and discourses about the natural environment. I really enjoyed doing the analysis, and it was an ideal piece of preparation for what I’ll be exploring in my PhD research… more on that as it develops. 😉

After handing in, I took myself out for an incredible plate of pasta carbonara (followed with tiramisù, of course) at Magari:

I’ve been letting my brain properly relax, and there’s a nice full carrier bag of books ready for me to take back to the uni library tomorrow. I’ve also been setting myself up for the next challenge. One of my big issues during this dissertation was trying to keep track of all the pieces of scholarship I read, and how they related to each other. The purely hierarchical structure of organisation in OneNote didn’t particularly help with that - so I’m making the big jump to Notion, and I’ve spent some time over the weekend fiddling around with it and seeing how it works.

Best

Lily