Last minute is never recommended!

Tuesday 10 May 2011

I am the Queen of procrastination, finding an infinite number of things to distract me while I should be doing work, whether this be Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, tidying my room or cleaning out the animals. The other day I took frequent walks around the house, telling myself it was to keep my legs stretched when in actual fact, I just didn't like the work I was doing. Things always get left to the last minute, for example, the 3000 word literature review which I managed to complete in one night, though I'm doubtful of it's quality. It might have gone better if I'd actually known how to write a literature review, but I suspect many people thought the same as me. In the case of the review however, it wasn't my intention to leave it until the last minute. I firmly believed that I had 2 weeks to complete the work. I actually only had 1 week, and that one week happened to be perhaps one of the busiest of my year so far. So it was that Sunday came around, and armed with Red Bull and chocolate, I stared at the pc for a good 12 hours. But it all got done.

Now I find myself sat staring at the pc trying to prepare myself for questions that may or may not be asked, conscious of the minutes slipping away, knowing that this time, it being last minute wasn't my fault. I just wasn't given a whole lot of time to prepare. Which annoys me more than you'd think. Afterall if you've left something till last minute and you don't do as well as you should have done, you can't be too annoyed with yourself because it was your decision to leave it till then. If something has been shoved on you last minute however, and you don't quite do as well as you'd hoped or should have done, well then it's not your fault, but it's something that goes against you anyway.

What will put the cherry on the cake is the awkward question prep being for nothing. As it stands I am revising metagenomics, the Human Microbiome Project, any references surrounding the one I was given to read (accounting to something in the 30's I believe), while preparing answers for why I want that particular PhD and why KCL and Oxford (you'd think that's be pretty obvious). Yet all I have to do all that in is one day...

In short, don't leave stuff till last minute. It never really ends as well as it should!