SO. Having said all that, there are blog posts I've written that have generated comments!
My most popular posts, in terms of the ones that make people actually post a comment or track back to, seem to be those I write about my life outside of graduate school. (Of course “popular” here is a relative term, seeing as this blog has a fairly small audience of regular readers.) In case you missed them, here’s a short tour of some of these entries:
My recent iPod Mixtape post, as well as pics of my kids’ first bike ride;
My experience with the "Frog Children”--probably one of my favorite posts;
A couple of my Kwanzaa posts (see here, for example), especially my tales of “Chia-Bart”;
My personal protest against mega-birthday parties for kids—a particularly fun entry since it put me back in touch with an old friend from Purdue;
One of the posts from my “31 Days of Black History Month” blogathon;
Finally, there have been occassional political commentaries, like this one where I "outed" myself as a liberal.
In addition to these posts, a couple of my general graduate school posts have received comments. Most notable--and fun to write--was my U of MN “Strategic Planning Rap.” This represents my first and likely only rap single, so read it while it’s hot! (...I can see you bobbing your head!)
ANYway. I guess the lesson to be learned from this (besides the very serious lesson I blogged about in the previous post) is that graduate students should never forsake personal lives for attempts at academic greatness. Blogging may or may not result in an award winning dissertation--But it sure is a fun way to document who you were at a particular moment in your life.
And that is as it should be. It's not the footnotes or the probability values or the prelim exams that make you, you. In the end it's your responses to your kids' first bicycle-skinned knees and participating in your country's political process and slathering seed juice over pottery that makes you who you really are.
Posted by perry032 at June 29, 2005 02:42 PM | TrackBackYvette, I love your blog and I read all the entries about dissertating - even when I don't understand them. You've been a big help to me in thinking through the different kinds of thinking involved in prelims, dissertation proposal, dissertation research.
I too have a (pre)dissertation blog, called Preliminary Reflections. I use it as a one-stop place to chronicle how my thinking is evolving. In fact, I was encouraged to post it on UThink (as opposed to just keeping it on my hard drive) by some fellow bloggers here at UThink. Thanks to them, too!
Keep blogging - and eventually you'll start getting the feedback and professional-level blogversations that you want! And thank you!
Posted by: Sno Cones at June 29, 2005 05:36 PMSo in laymens' terms - what is adoption genetics. Did I get thrown by the word genetics, which I associate with biology/science and not something that is influenced directly by experience?
Posted by: Mieke at June 30, 2005 01:22 PM