At the dinner table, the night before our exam, this was how my conversation with Rockstar went…
K: O, ano yung pinakamagandang article para sa iyo?
R: Ha? (Isip…)
K: Ako, favorite ko yung kay XX at kay YY. Astig kaya yung ginawa nila!
R: Sus, hindi kaya. Simple lang naman yung kanila e. Mas okay yung kanila ZZ at AA.
K&R: Blah, blah, blah…
Ending: Humahalakhak kami. Because we never thought that reading so many journal articles would lead us to the kind of conversation that we had. As if we were talking about our favorite scenes in a movie or the most cherished places we had been too. No worries though, for it was just the first time we had that talk- just to laugh the jitters off before the exam day. Our daily conversations are still perfectly normal and sane, if you will.
I ranted in Facebook some months ago, “Why can’t journal articles be like novels? So that you can say- “Damn, this journal article is so hard to put down?” I didn’t really hate reading them- otherwise I should not be in this academic program I am in right now. The terrible part is when you get swamped by those articles (every lecture meeting that we have requires 2-4 papers for background reading and we have two meetings a week) and you haven’t even finished reading the first paper (because of the technicalities of the author’s experiments; and so you needed to read other reference papers or books to backup your knowledge on the techniques they used). In addition, attention span in reading scientific articles seemed so short. That was why I was looking for some elements of novels or short stories in those papers. But as Piolo said, “By then Ph.D. would just be another book club.” Oh well. It’s a matter of getting used to them. Eventually, it would be easier to see the big picture coming out of the abstract, introduction, methodology, discussion and conclusion.
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