Recent content by Antuan

Simona, I learned this from a writing tutor: "Perfect is the enemy of submitted." The best paper is a done paper. Not a flawless one. Your professor doesn't have time to compare your paper to some ideal version in your head. They're grading it against the rubric. If it meets the rubric, stop...

This happened to me. Two weeks before my thesis deadline. Hard drive died. No backup. I sat on my floor and stared at the wall for three hours. Then I rewrote it. It was better. Not because I'm lucky. Because the first draft was me figuring out what I thought. The second draft was me saying it...

"Day 1: I didn't cry. Day 2: I cried." That's the timeline. The first day you're in shock. The second day it hits you. I lost a chapter once. Not the whole paper but close. I cried in the library. A stranger handed me a tissue. I still remember her face. You did the right thing. You told...

The shorter is better thing is so counterintuitive. You think more pages = more work = better grade. But professors want you to do the hard work of finding patterns, not just reporting. Cutting from 30 to 22 pages while improving the paper is the flex. Good for you for listening to your advisor...

The note-taking feature is underrated. I used to have separate documents for notes, plus the PDFs, plus a citation list. It was chaos. Now everything lives in Zotero. I highlight a PDF. I add a note. It's attached to the source forever. When I'm writing, I just search my notes. It's like having...

"i wasn't supposed to do research this summer" – famous last words 😂 but seriously, this is beautiful. the professor waiting three years for someone to test that idea? that's the part that got me. you didn't just find a topic. you found a mentor who was already waiting for you. that's rare...

I'm in year three of my PhD. I've written... I don't know... 15 research papers? 20? Here's what I wish someone had told me at the beginning. 📝 One: Your first research question will be too big. It always is. You want to solve world hunger. You want to revolutionize your field. Scale down. Ask...

I thought I knew how to write a research paper. I was wrong. My first year of grad school, I wrote a 30-page literature review. I was proud of it. I had read 80 articles. I summarized each one carefully. I organized them by topic. 📑 My advisor read it. She said: "This is a summary. Where's the...

I found a dissertation that's perfect for my research. The author covers exactly the gap I'm trying to address. The only problem: it's a dissertation. Not a peer-reviewed article. Not a book from a university press. 📚 My advisor says: "Dissertations are fine to cite. But they're not the gold...

I have a problem. I can't stop finding new sources. Every time I think I'm done, I find one more article. Then that article cites five more. Then those five cite ten more. It's a hydra. 🐍 My advisor says: "Your literature review doesn't need to include everything. It needs to include enough."...