The perils of the chronic over-achiever
I think I'm going to cry. :-(
Since last night, I've been incorporating all of my Handel research into my outline so I can see what holes need to be filled. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have discovered I have considerably more information than I need. That is, the length limit on the paper is 20 pages, and my outline is already 8 pages long, and I haven't incorporated even half of my notes into it yet, never mind the score analyses that I've only barely started and which I expect to be the focus of the paper since that will consist of original conclusions from original research.
This sounds like a fabulous problem to have, but it's depressing me to think of how much time I have spent painstakingly collecting information that I can't use. I mean, I could write a book with the information I've collected so far, and yet there is so much yet to do because I've only barely started the score analyses.
It sounds really stupid, but this is really really upsetting me.
Since last night, I've been incorporating all of my Handel research into my outline so I can see what holes need to be filled. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have discovered I have considerably more information than I need. That is, the length limit on the paper is 20 pages, and my outline is already 8 pages long, and I haven't incorporated even half of my notes into it yet, never mind the score analyses that I've only barely started and which I expect to be the focus of the paper since that will consist of original conclusions from original research.
This sounds like a fabulous problem to have, but it's depressing me to think of how much time I have spent painstakingly collecting information that I can't use. I mean, I could write a book with the information I've collected so far, and yet there is so much yet to do because I've only barely started the score analyses.
It sounds really stupid, but this is really really upsetting me.
posted by DenverSop @ 12:36 PM
3 Comments:
At 9/25/2007 11:02 PM,
DenverSop said…
I'm feeling a bit better about it now because I've taken some time to regroup. I need to dig into the scores, decide what I want to say about them, and then add some of the rest of it back in.
Or it might be that I have bigger, more imminent things to fret about... like the fact that I forgot my conducting folder and I have a lesson tomorrow. (I spend the night in Windsor on Tuesdays.) I've emailed my professor to see if he wants me to wing it or reschedule. It's not that he doesn't have backup copies I can use, but I scribbled all over mine, and I know I relied on those scribbles, I just don't know how much.
I always feel inadequate when it comes to conducting lessons. There's a certain degree of black & white - either you've mastered the week's assignments or you haven't, and I feel like I never do. The professor doesn't seem disappointed in me, though. It is a motor skill, so it's a totally different kind of thing than the usual academics, but the perfectionist in me goes berserk at not mastering the baby steps week to week, especially since I'm spending a lot of time on it.
Ah, grad school has done nothing if not rekindle my latent perfectionism.
At 9/26/2007 6:24 AM,
Anonymous said…
One supposes it could be worse. You could have not enough information which was always my problem.
Ever thought it could be a masters thesis?
~BPP
At 10/08/2007 9:10 AM,
Sherrie said…
Perhaps my opinion is unwanted or unnecessary here, but with such caveats I do add it in just in case it has value to you...
I think there is no such thing as too much information :)
I believe where the elegance of great thinking reveals itself is in the mental processing and combining of that information to reveal the sum of it all in a clean, precise, and easy-to-follow way in which clarity is the overriding sense. How do the concepts relate? What are the high points and then only briefly the sub-points that support the contention? To what conclusion (ahhh, the bottom line) does this line of thinking take us?
But that's just an accountant's opinion developed over years of financial and operational analysis, and it may have no value at all in a musician's world! I'm excited for you and will pray for this paper :)
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