Don't Double Dip.

[citrakayah]

You've been told never to get COVID. You've been told never to get the flu. Let me tell you that they go even worse together. I somehow managed to get both at once when visiting family for Thanksgiving. I'm not sure whom I got it from--probably not my parents, since they came down after I did, and it couldn't have been from a third party because I only went outside in isolated public parks. One of my other relatives seems the most likely possibility.

It was nasty. I've never had body aches from being sicky before. Injuries, yes; I've fallen down my share of slopes (and off a cliff, once); that hurt. But for two days I had trouble moving because I was aching, and at night even with four blankets I had chills. Then I had nausea, and the second worst case of congestion I've ever had. The symptoms lasted a week, though there was a gap of two days when I seemed to be fine.

Luckily, things have cleared up now.

As far as classes, I'm in the tail end of things. Finals have been going well--aside from my group presentations. Which, given that they're what I'm doing for two thirds of my classes, is a rather large wrinkle in things. It's not affecting my grades, but it's still been frustrating. For one class, my group-mate got injured and so I'm having to work by myself. Not their fault, but unfortunate for us both.

For the other? I put in a ton of effort, read like fifteen papers, but they ended up not using much of the research I put in to try and help them and their own work was, in my opinion, kind of sloppy. There were a lot of misspellings and grammatical errors. They didn't give really in-depth explanations of what they were talking about but gave superficial surface-level stuff you'd teach to a middle-schooler.

Given that we're graduate students, that's pretty frustrating.

Family is doing well. Unfortunately, I won't be with them for Hanukkah, because of finals. This is actually the first year in a while I haven't been able to visit them for it. Still, they visited today and I got to enjoy their company.

Comments

[elinox]

Glad you're finally feeling better, that sick-cocktail sounds absolutely awful!

[citrakayah]

Thanks.

[scatteredshells]

Oh no! I'm glad you're finally better, that sounded just awful! :(

[lhexan]

Commiserations on the double whammy. It reminds me of the time in 2016 I caught a two-week flu, followed by two weeks of mild pneumonia -- after returning from a trip to China, no less. But a double whammy with Covid and the flu would be even worse.

Group projects are awful, because typically one person ends up doing the lion's share of the work. I'm astounded anyone would still assign them in graduate school.

Remind me what you're studying? I'm back in graduate school for mathematics, myself. With yesterday's final, I'm now a third of the way through my most difficult year here.

[citrakayah]

Thanks.

Yeah, about half to a third of my final projects here have been group projects. I do think this makes some degree of sense--if you presume that everyone there is a mature competent adult, it lets you train people on how to work as part of a team. That's an important skill! And I do think they probably grade based on it (sometimes I've been asked to evaluate my teammates, and I think here the professor could tell who put most of the work in; we got individual feedback).

The problem is that a large number of the people here aren't mature competent adults. Some of them are straight out of college. I worked since 2018 and was working, if not always in my field, something adjacent to it (I was a college lab tech for a while). These people? Don't think they really know what they're doing. I had to explain to them that in graduate school, we were expected to cite sources and be specific when answering questions in an essay format. I also had to explain to them that you can't just go off a source like Britannica and need to look at the primary literature.

My grade may not suffer at all, but I take a degree of pride in the material I present. And it feels almost insulting to the rest of the class to give a presentation that doesn't delve deeply into what we're presenting on and isn't thought-provoking.

I'm studying conservation biology.

[lhexan]

Ah. I think this is one of those times where I should remember that science is vast, and my experience with good practices in teaching physics and mathematics won't carry over so many fields. Still, I hope you end up with a more thoughtful team the next time such assignments roll around.