Sunday Afternoon Formal Lab Report Fun

The fun of a Sunday afternoon is seemingly lost once you realise just how long it takes to finish a formal lab report in the Physics Department. Due to outside committments I've essentially had about a week give or take a few days to finish this formal along with a standard lab write for A1, an astronomy lab, at the same time.

I started work on Wednesday afternoon after completing three of the four lab sessions for the astro lab. We had all our results and given that I wanted this lab write-up out the way, I set about completing it by the end of the day. The time drew nearer about 10pm and I realised that finishing wasn't likely in the next couple of hours. Regardless things were looking good timing wise. I'd certainly get the write-up completed by the end of Thursday (which I managed narrowly to do with just a couple of references and page numbers to sort out) and then have Friday evening, all of Saturday, most of Sunday and the whole of Monday to sort out the formal report for S1, the spectrometry lab. The deadline is Tuesday afternoon so by my plans I'd even have Tuesday morning for some finishing touches and checking through. Excellent.

Well Friday evening came and I started writing the formal for the lab I probably liked least. I managed to write up most of the theory and called it a night pretty early to sit back and enjoy some beers. Basically I had no motivation to keep going after already spending two days solid on another lab.

I woke up early on Saturday, keen to go into the library and use the silent study room and some extra books to crack on and get most of the report done. My housemate came with me to find some references for his report and A1 write-up as well. Things were again looking promising as I completed some difficult sections and set about drawing some diagrams on a laptop (never a simple task). We went for lunch and ended up watching the darts society's version of bullseye. After an hour or so I comtemplated going back to the library and then decided I'd rather go home. In hindsight this was a bad plan.

Despite knowing I should be working when I got back, I opted to do meaningless tasks such as finally cleaning the house and organising notes just to break the monotiny of report writing. This wasted most of the afternoon and with my girlfriend visiting in a few hours time I was destined to do no more work until Sunday afternoon.

That brings me to the present. It's about 4pm and I've been working again on the report for a good couple of hours. Sadly it's not progressing at any real speed and I see various problems ahead. Once I finally manage to complete the results and discussion section, I'll have about 10/11 pages. This has to be cut down to 9 pages to be accepted. That's probably going to require more effort than writing most of it in the first place as there are few places I can cut down without losing valuable aspects of my report. After that, I have the obvious thrill of referencing everything, page numbering and figure labelling. I don't envisage an early night.

Ive also promised myself that I'm not going to leave a large amount of work still to do tomorrow. That means I've really got to find some motivation and plough through, even though currently I'm getting distracted by anything and everything (evidently shown by my blogging).

I'll update with results of completion when it happens hopefully.

: 09 Mar 2008 16:06 |  Tags: Lab Report Spectrometry |  Comments (0) |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem