Future graduate students

Last semester, Nikolay Videnov won the Best Presenter award at the University of Waterloo and the University of Strathclyde’s Virtual Research Colloquium. We love to see UW students succeed at presentations, so we thought we’d reach out and have a short conversation about how that presentation came together, and to pick Nikolay’s brain about the process.  

Alongside the rest of UWaterloo, the Writing and Communication Centre (WCC) has been working hard to transition our services into an online format for the Spring 2020 term. Our team is tirelessly striving to ensure that we can continue to support you as much as possible throughout the changes brought by the ongoing pandemic. As a result of these efforts, we are excited to announce that on June 1st, we will be launching the Spring 2020 WCC workshops on a new LEARN website! 

It’s always hard to write. Even as someone who loves writing, I hate sitting down to actually do it. Especially now, with the paradoxical pandemic life of being exhausted, wired, busy, bored, lonely, and completely overwhelmed with Zoom-based social activities, it’s really, really hard to write my seemingly endless dissertation.  

The title of this post is misleading. It implies that productivity and self-care are separate and opposing things. But they aren’t. We can’t be productive without taking care of ourselves. This relationship between productivity and self-care is particularly important right now, during a stressful, frightening situation where expectations on all of us nonetheless remain high. While we navigate the coronavirus pandemic together, we can try three simple things to tackle our research and writing:

Have you ever tried getting Google Translate to rap before? It’s probably one of the funniest things you can do with translate, outside of totally messing with Disney songs. When I’m not using translate as a means to laugh though, I’m using it to revise my essay by having Google read it out loud to me. Granted, that usually is also very funny, as the automated voice has a habit for tripping over lengthy sentences as well as butchering incorrect spelling of words. Use that last bit with caution though, Google Translate does have a habit for pronouncing everyday words like “get” very wrong.

When I was younger, the more pieces of punctuation I could add to a written work, the more I felt like some sort of literary genius. “Yeah, I’m ten and can use a comma, period, exclamation mark, and question mark within two sentences. I’m just that cool.”