Category: Graduate School
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You Can Read Academic Japanese
Oftentimes reading academic articles in a foreign language can be a rather intimidating task, but this may come as a surprise: reading academic articles in Japanese is actually pretty easy. Well, okay it does have two little prerequisites: a decent familiarity with Chinese characters and a basic understanding of Japanese grammar. This is nothing a…
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Moving the discussion abroad
As I’ve been working on my Master’s degree here in Taiwan, I’ve gone out and looked for resources, tips, strategies and more for doing a dissertation and handling pressure during graduate school. I’ve found that, while there is plenty of websites/blogs/etc. talking about getting through the dissertation at home, very few discuss going through the…
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Get writing!
I met with one of my professors a few months ago just to have a cup of coffee and chat a bit about things. One of the topics we came upon was how my thesis was going (a question, I think, most graduate students dread when getting into their final months of writing). I had…
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Spreadsheeting it out
Although I do love the mobility of Pages and Numbers, especially the cloud sync and having the documents up to date on all my computers–I find Google Docs is actually a very powerful alternative. Let me give a quick example of how I used a spreadsheet in Google Docs to keep track of data that…
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A little look into my schedule
In order to understand why GNDN and pomodoro techniques are necessary for me, I’m going to introduce a little bit about what my daily schedule looks like. 6:00 Wake up; shower; make breakfast and prepare lunch. 6:50 leave and catch bus to Taipei. 8:00 get to office (I take a 20 minute walk from the…
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Whistle While You Work
I’m someone that needs to listen to music while working, especially when writing. I can’t work in dead silence, which is probably why I never study in libraries. Music helps keep me motivated and also gives me the energy to keep going. I prefer instrumental tracks, like classical music (and dare I say) video game…
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GNDN and the Pomodoro Technique
GNDN is a favorite acronym of mine which stands for “Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing”. That’s kind of how I feel when I don’t have any specific set goals or timeboxing set in place. Instead, I wander around the internet for a bit and effectively don’t get anything done until I hit crisis time. I’m someone…
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Doing things bass-aackwards
I wonder if that’s actually the proper way to type that? Anyway. As part of the program (Master’s in History; 歷史所，碩士班) and the topic (Japanese Occupation Period in Taiwan; 日治時代) that I am currently studying, I am currently and will have to deal with many Japanese academic articles as well as contemporary pieces (government documents,…
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Chinese<->English Glossary
I stumbled upon this resource from National Taiwan University (NTU; 臺大). It’s a glossary of common Chinese to English terms, and is very useful in the university environment! English（英文版）: http://host.cc.ntu.edu.tw/sec/sec_eng/chineng.html Chinese（中文版）: http://host.cc.ntu.edu.tw/sec/englishterm.htm (Content is the same) Examples: 諮商輔導 Student Counseling 獎學金 Scholarships 工讀 Part-Time Job 請假 Student Leave of Absence 學生平安保險…
En Route To Fluency 