Side effect #1: Weird social behavior
You wont find research students in a group of more than two, as they cant afford to! You know how hard it is match one's procrastination models, time management tools and techniques, and research orientations :). And when we are in a group, its hard for us to talk in a normal language. We tend to perform proper post-mortem of discussions happening around the table - and if they are not dead, they will eventually be :). And with all those readings and reflections day in day out, it is hard for us to come in a listening mode.
Side effect #3: No sense of time!
No matter how tough prediction task one is handling in his/her thesis, it is always hard for a research student to predict whether tomorrow is friday or saturday!
Today, I saw one familiar face in library as I was messed up with one of those NLP papers. To my surprise, I stopped him and said "I know you, right!". He too was familiar with my face. He said he was 2008 pass out...
my response: "hmm...2008...err which year is this..2010. Let me think, I joined three years back so I was with 2008 pass out batch ...no no 2009 pass out batch...no, I dont know" and I gave up.
And I couldn't help appreciating my temporal sense :). Actually he was from our senior batch who once got disturbed by our noisy project discussions in library. Thank God, my memory hasn't deceived me yet.
Side effect #3: What was I saying?
This syndrome runs in sync with our thesis progress. If one is at an initial stage where we have no specific direction of research, one tends to digress a lot from the main line of thought - as one must! And as we sit in a group, we talk about mess food, and suddenly we land up talking about organic food, business, profit, India China USA moon sun GOD $%^*#$%#%. But as the research progresses in a defined direction, one can see same amount of serenity coming along our faces :).
Written with no intentions of generalization.
