Small steps

I had a meeting with my advisor yesterday afternoon, and I'm both slightly overwhelmed and feeling slightly better. My brain has been working against me lately (see previous post), and I've had a hard time concentrating on developing a project. I have some very loose ideas and have been trying to do a literature search to tighten up the threads, but my tiredness (both mentally and physically) have been making that a touch difficult. I've talked with Barney briefly about it, and he set me onto some older literature to try to help me focus. I'll be working my way through some of that this weekend.

On a slightly brighter note, we decided that I could probably do my qualifying exam pretty soon (by the end of the Summer, at the latest) -- a full year ahead of the deadline at which we are supposed to have it done. This consists of sitting down with three committee members (I definitely have one in Barney, a definite idea to ask for a second, and I'm waffling on the third) to go over my GRE subject scores and plan out my courses as well as deciding what to do about the foreign language and advanced statistics requirements. I also need to have an idea of what I want to study. The advantage to doing this now as opposed to a year from now (besides getting it out of the way) is that the expectations for the research component are lower. Right now, I'd only need a specific idea and broad questions, whereas a year from now I'd have to have all (or a majority) of the methods lined out. I think I'll go for now, thanks.

As far as my anxiety goes, the meeting with Barney has me feeling a little better. I'm still meeting with the Student Health doc on Monday (he wasn't in yesterday), and I have an appointment on Friday at the counseling center to try to work through all the stuff I've been letting build up over the last few YEARS and to learn some relaxation techniques.