The Benefit of Research

The past week or two have been odd ones. I've gone back and forth between periods of my mind buzzing with a combination of information, anxiety, and stress, and periods of doing the various things I do to burn off anxiety and stress, which in all honesty probably burn off a little bit of information as well.

The past 8 weeks have been a live fire exercise in finding and testing my academic limits. I hit them somewhere around week 5, but this is real life so you can't just call the experiment and try again, you have to push forward.

Today I did something that changed my perspective. A large part of the anxiety and stress has come from looking at the books left on the stack, the ones I simply am not going to get to, and thinking I could have done more. Today though, I'm finalizing my outline, and I've finally constructed the logical flow my term paper will follow. It has a minimum page limit of eight, and I was worried about that until I saw the seven step outline of my paper and realized I essentially just had to write a page on each of the seven key elements.

I could probably write ten pages just on the first two. There's a serious chance that once I'm done fleshing out my outline it alone will be five pages long. I still have a lot of work to do, but it's nice to stop for a moment and truly appreciate just how much I've done. It adds a much needed positive perspective to everything.