anadeja

[anadeja]

GRE Prep, Day??, 8/8/17

So basically I pushed GRE prep real hard for 4 days and burnt out for like two weeks. Haha. Following Magoosh was very helpful, but it also made me feel terrible about myself because the first week focused mainly on quant, which sent me into a spiral of self doubt and depression, so.

I still want to use the Magoosh plan as a guide, but I think I’ve found a better way that fits my brain. Magoosh is also lovely and has over 600 quant and verbal. I’ve been doing at least 50 of the vocab questions a day for a few days, until I finish, and then I’ll move onto the vocab questions I have in the books I have. In between I’m doing a few of the quant questions and slowly building myself up to take a practice test so I can see what the distribution is of question types.

It feels kind of silly to me to be doing it this way, when I’m decent at verbal already, but I’m also not at as high of a verbal score that I thought. And when I do the verbal questions, it feels like I improve, even over the course of one session of 50 questions. 

So that��s where I’m at right now. Trying not to burn out, but also keep prep up. I have 64 days left until my test. Gotta stay on it. 

[anadeja]

🌼🌻study smarter🌻🌼

(here are some study tips straight from my psych notes)

1. interest: the brain prioritizes by meaning, value, and relevance so u remember things better if ur interested

find a study partner

do extra practice or research

teach it to someone else (this works so well!)

2. intent: be actively paying attention. very little learning actually takes place without attention

use a concentration check sheet (every time u get distracted, put a check on ur sheet. this is supposed to program ur mind to pay attention)

while u read, talk back to the author

ask questions during lectures (this is scary ik!! but do it!)

3. basic background: make connections to what u already know

preview and skim the material before u read it. or google it!

write out a list of vocab words before a lecture and leave some spaces between them to fill in during the lecture

read ahead of lectures

watch crashcourse tbh

4. selectivity: start by studying whats important

look for bolded words, graphics, pictures, chapter review questions in ur readings

listen for verbal clues like emphasis and repetition during lectures

make urself a study guide as u read and write down questions for urself to answer later as review (kinda like cornell notes)

5. meaningful organization: u can learn/rmr better if u group ideas into diff categories

apply vocab words to ur life

make flashcards and sort them (try not to have more than seven items in one category!)

use mnemonics

6. recitation: saying ideas aloud in ur own words strengthens synaptic connections! when u say something aloud u r forcing urself to pay attention

after u read, ask urself questions

talk abt what u learned w/ classmates outside of class

again, teach someone else

7. visualization: ur brain’s quickest and longest-lasting response is to images

convert info into a chart or graph

draw it out

make a mental video of a process

look at picture/video examples

8. association: memory is increased when facts are consciously associated w something u already know. memory = making neural connections

ask urself: is this something i already know?

9. consolidation: give ur brain some time to establish a neural pathway

make a list of what u remember from class

review notes at the end of the day, every day

stop after reading each prg to write a question in ur notes

make ur own practice quiz

10. distributed practice: we all know cramming doesnt work but we do it anyway! but yeah short and frequent study sections work better

make a daily/weekly study schedule

create a time budget/time tracker (track everything ur doing for a week and see how u can be more efficient w/ the time u waste)

divide the reading/vocab by the number of days before an exam and do a little bit each day (u can use sticky notes to divide ur reading)

other tips:

stop stressing! this sounds stupid and it isnt going to be easy, but anxiety causes u to lose focus. try ur best to think positively. sleep a lot. minimize ur caffeine intake. take a walk maybe

when u need to remember something, look upward or close ur eyes (when ur eyes are open ur using visual parts of ur brain that u might not need to be using)

find a rival! (like the person right above u in class rank) secretly compete w/ them (envy can improve mental persistence bc it makes u focus more intensely) but dont overdo it! 

walking and sleeping build memory storage in ur brain

eat flavonoids! (grapes, berries, tea leaves, cocoa beans make neurons in the brain more capable of forming new memories + increase blood flow to the brain)

obstacles force ur brain to try harder, so space learning lessons apart or create a puzzle to solve or change ur physical setting

[anadeja]

August spread for my bullet journal. Had a bad couple weeks, ready to start strong with more GRE prep.

[anadeja]

I've been a real bad mom and haven't taken a lot of pictures of Yoshi lately. Here's a few. She does not like when I point the phone at her, so you can appreciate the sideeye. Listen kid I know it's annoying but you're only adorable so many times (all the time. She's adorable all the time, it's hard living with her).

[anadeja]

At the local Barnes and Noble today.

[anadeja]

GRE Prep Day 2: 7/19/17

Day 2! I had a bad day yesterday so I just skipped it, since this schedule gives me one day off. Today I did the second day of Magoosh, which was more reading of the Quant section and doing 15 minutes of algebra cards. I’ve been doing vocab cards every chance that I get, but I’m going to try and take the Magoosh advice and read some varied literature too. I also remembered that my friend gave me a copy of the ETS book a few weeks ago so I dug it up out of a box and compared the two. Overall I like the Kaplan book better but i’ll probably use both.

I need to do a practice test! On the last day of this schedule Magoosh has me writing two essays but I think I’ll do a practice test instead. I think that’s a better use of my time at this point. 

[anadeja]

Prep Day 1: 7/17/2017

In my intro post I said I’d be studying using Magoosh. I am using their 90 day plan. Today I completed Day 1, sans some of the GRE videos. I think their videos are okay, but the audio quality isn’t great (which is something I notice, i wish I didn’t haha), so I probably won’t be using their videos too often, plus I think you a lot of the stuff in the book I have is just the same. I’m also using the Kaplan test book (because that’s the one I had and I don’t want to buy a new one), so I’m just reading what I think corresponds to the plan.

I think the algebra cards they had are great! I had no idea where to start with re-learning all the math I’ll need, but the cards helped give me a place to start. I recommend for anyone just super confused and not knowing where to go to start.

I also did a round of Quizlet for vocab words, using this set. It seems really complete! As I progress, I’ll make my own set to practice on so I can personalize my experience and get the most out of it. 

It took me about an hour and a half to do all of the readings and the vocab, with a 10 minute break. Because I can’t stop myself, I’ll probably do more vocab readings tonight. Feeling pretty good for a first day.  

[anadeja]

New beginnings

Greeting studyblr community!!

My name is Kim and I am a recent graduate with a degree in Communication and Media Studies and a minor in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. I live in the Seattle area and planning on applying to a Seattle area school at the end of this year. I have overlapping interests in both communication and GWSS, and am hoping to get into one of these programs at my dream school.

I used this studyblr sparingly for my undergrad work but will be using it now as I study in the next few months for the GRE. I’m planning on taking it in Bellingham, Washington in November. If there are any central/north WA studyblrs, say hello!

I’m using Magoosh and a book to study.

Really excited to get this journey started! 

[anadeja]

DEAR RESEARCHERS OF TUMBLR

You know what’s awesome?  Research.  You know what’s not awesome?  Not being able to get access to research because it’s stuck behind a paywall and you don’t belong to an institution/your institution doesn’t subscribe to that particular journal.

FEAR NOT.

Here is a list of free, open access materials on a variety of subjects.  Feel free to add if you like!

GO FORTH AND LEARN SHIT, MY FRIENDS.

Directory of Open Access Journals- A compendium of over 9000 journals from 133 countries, multilingual and multidisciplinary.

Directory of Open Access Books- Like the above, but for ebooks.  Also multidisciplinary.

Ubiquity Press- Journals covering archaeology, comics scholarship, museum studies, psychology, history, international development, and more.  Also publishes open access ebooks on a wide variety of subjects.

Europeana-  Digital library about the history and culture of Europe.

Digital Public Library of America- American history, culture, economics, SO MUCH AMERICA.

Internet Archive- In addition to books, they have music and videos, too.  Free!  And legal!  They also have the Wayback Machine, which lets you see webpages as they looked at a particular time.

College and Research Libraries- Library science and information studies.  Because that’s what I do.

Library of Congress Digital Collections- American history and culture, historic newspapers, sound recordings, photographs, and a ton of other neat stuff.

LSE Digital Library- London history, women’s history.

Wiley Open Access- Science things!  Neurology, medicine, chemistry, ecology, engineering, food science, biology, psychology, veterinary medicine.

SpringerOpen-  Mainly STEM journals, looooong list.

Elsevier Open Access-  Elsevier’s kind of the devil but you might as well take advantage of this.  Mainly STEM, also a linguistics journal and a medical journal in Spanish.

[anadeja]

Research organizing

Has anyone used a personal wiki to organize research? I’m messing around with TiddlyWiki today and it seems like a good option! Interested in hearing other perspectives.

[anadeja]

http://www.pcgamer.com/twitch-researcher-confirms-that-livestreams-help-boost-game-sales/?utm_content=buffer16e9e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer-pcgamertw

[anadeja]

Just realizing as I looked back over some past work, I’ve written probably close to 20 pages about Twitch for school. I’m realizing that I need to start synthesizing. I’m rapidly running up against the guise of “getting information.” I need to make a claim soon. I need to start interviewing soon. I need to start writing soon.

Instead of being comforted by the fact that I’ve learned so much about Twitch in the past six months, I instead feel panicky. There’s so much more to learn and know! When do you start putting it all together? 

[anadeja]

can streaming be resistance? is that fucking stupid? someone tell me. 

[anadeja]

I met my adviser on Wednesday afternoon and forked over all my work - annotated bibliography with ten sources (mostly books), my abstract, and most importantly, my lit review. 

She gave me good feedback and we talked for almost an hour. We’ve only met in little chunks of time, so it was nice to have some good time with her, though I’d wish I had met her more throughout the quarter. I gave her a thank you card, and she opened it and read it and seemed really happy that I’d written what I had, so I’m glad I took the time to write something thoughtful. 

She was pleased with my lit review, but thought it could use another draft or two. Which is totally okay, because they’re hard! She gave me specific feedback and we actually talked about our passions. She said that she felt like I was holding back, but she knew that I was mad. And that she wanted to see that come through in my work, that she wanted me to stay mad and articulate it. 

It was a wonderful moment. I wrote that down and it’s on a post it on my computer now. Because I am mad. I am mad about the misogyny and racism on Twitch. I am mad about a million things about the world. I can’t fix everything, but I can work in this space and contribute something. The academic part of it doesn’t erase the passion. It was good timing, because in my previous class we had been discussing academia as activism. And what it’s place was. 

So anyway. It’s a good way to end the quarter. I’m working on the revisions right now and will send those off, and then the next two days I must be an essay writing powerhouse. Almost done. 

Two weeks off, and then back at it for summer quarter. Currently taking three classes, but I might shave one off if it gets too overwhelming. Yay vacation!

[anadeja]

For reference, to watch. 

[anadeja]

5/27

Thoughts on my second stream, in which I streamed “Omnibus,” an indie game:

Better than the first. I realized after watching the VOD of my last, the game audio wasn’t coming through. >.> So, that was definitely picked up this time, but the sound was also low. So. Good thing I have a sound guy to figure things out for me! Probably after school ends for the quarter.

Today was a good stream, but I said something I don’t want on my stream. I apologized immediately and it made me start thinking about those little slips and how they breed a community. I am very well aware of what I say and what the words I say mean. I’ve been trying to curb my language, which is a tough thing for me, because, frankly, I curse like a sailor. But I’m trying to run a “professional” stream and one that I can point to in my academic work. Because of that, I need to watch what I say more carefully than if I were during this for leisure. 

It also made me hope that nobody saw me! I said something offensive to a lot of people (”son of a,” for disclosure) that I say in my own life, to myself and those close to me. More and more layers of personal identity keep forming, and that’s something to keep track of.  

Anyway. I skipped a day because I was busy on Thursday but will hopefully be back next Tuesday and Thursdays. It’s finals, so that might be sketchy, but twice a week is the plan. I picked up Overwatch and played a little today and think that will probably be a good stream game for me to play. 

[anadeja]

First experience streaming with scheduled cast (I’ll probably make a proper blog post out of this, but so I remember):

The night before I set up OBS Studio by following a guide online: http://nerdordie.com/tutorials/best-obs-studio-settings/

I did a test cast using Town of Salem to check audio. I have a ShureM8 mic arm and a mic arm clamped to my desk, along with a Sennheiser Game Zero headset that I use for my own audio. I tried to set up a recording playback so I could listen to myself speak and adjust accordingly, but the echo came through over OBS. I’m sure there’s a workaround. 

I was intending on playing Crusader Kings 2 for my first cast. Other options were Minecraft and the Division. I ended up not playing Minecraft because I could not log into my account (oops) and didn’t play The Division because, well, I didn’t really feel like it. Crusader Kings 2 ended up crashing every time I opened it, so I ended up playing ANATOMY, by kittyhorrorshow. ANATOMY is an indie horror game and I had been wanting to play it for awhile. It also was only supposed to be around 30-45 minutes, which I thought was good for a first cast. I downloaded it and set it up pretty quickly and then started streaming.

I had one viewer most of the cast, a friend. Later, someone retweeted my tweet about streaming and I ended up with around 10 as I was finishing up. There was some chatter between friends in the chat, but nothing too in depth. I ended about an hour and fifteen minutes after I started.

I’m hoping to have Crusader Kings 2 working by Thursday. I think this was a successful test run and I hope to have a blog post about my first few experiences in a few weeks on my site.