Homework over the Holidays

Update first: I have the new header for Mylifeinalabcoat.com. Me with a snake (which I for some reason decided was science-y) and moved the old header on over to MylifeOUTOFalabcoat.com. If you are a follower here you should click on over there to become a follower. As my previous post mentioned, I am splitting the content of my old single blog into two more awesome/streamlined blogs.

Now that we're done with that, I want to talk about something, that in my 21 year of education I still struggle with.

Homework over the Holidays.

Every time I pack a bag to head home to visit my family, I seesaw over whether or not to bring homework. For short/busy visits during the year, I have become pretty good at saying:

"no, you will not touch that text book, save you luggage and you back the 10 pounds and don't pack it"

The Christmas Holidays, due to their longer duration (nearly two full weeks this year), however, present a greater challenge. To study or not to study? As an undergrad student, the years when I had no full year courses were a particular delight, to complete my last exam (usually after Dec 20th) and spend the entire holiday, blissfully with no academic demands on my time. I believe this only occurred once in first year.

On the other hand, graduate school, knows no true breaks. As such, I have a USB key full of graphs to organize into some semblance of figures for a paper, along with a draft of my research proposal to begin reducing, reorganizing, rewriting, and replacing the reductions. Dutifully as ever I have taken it home with me.

Amid the typically holiday flurry of family, friends and food, however, I haven't spent nearly as much productive time with them as I had hoped to by this point.

And so I give you my holidays, 2012/2013 solution to that erroneous sin. 1 day spent in transit at my uncle's in Hamilton, with no worldly distractions from my writing; coupled with arriving back in Calgary on a Friday while not returning to the lab until Monday. Giving me a whole weekend of progress ahead.

Ah yes in typical, student fashion, I have solved a problem of chronic procrastination with scheduled procrastination.

Do you bring homework home for the holidays? What are your mechanisms for dealing with it?

Also this is an approximation of the kind of posts to expect on this blog: Life In. Once again click on over to Life Out Of for my lifestyle blog of day to day awesome. But if you liked this post, let me know in the comments!