This is the first post among a series of short reflections pertaining to conducting internship work under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer Stone and guidance of Dr. Patricia Jenkins.

With this first writing I want to specifically focus on my time management – its successes, struggles, methods of improvement, and surprising factors. So far, the successes in managing my time have been, in no small part, due to the type of work I have been assigned. Building an actual corpus, converting documents, reviewing consistency, analyzing patterns, and researching methodologies within corpus linguistics and text mining – while perhaps a bit monotonous – has been very intriguing; subsequently, time that would have been spent winding down in recreation, during the later afternoon and evening hours, has been occupied with the assigned tasks – which have been very interesting in their scope. Forethought in organizing and allotting hours within my calendar has also aided in these successes. It is difficult to ignore the cacophony of alert sounds my mobile devices barrage me at the designated hour; additionally, I have attempted to avoid long bouts conducting assigned tasks– ensuring short breaks at specific intervals to avoid burnout. This has been very successful; hopefully, I will maintain this practice as it will be the key to continued success. However, even while it is early in the semester and so eagerness still fuels a portion of my efforts, procrastination will be a consistent threat to my performance; additionally, inefficient workflows have slowed progress delaying work efforts – particularly in converting and reviewing the quality of scanned documents to be used within the project corpus. The error rate when converting through Adobe Acrobat or R’s tm package leaves many lexical and formatting errors to be corrected due to noise artifacts, lighting, and low resolution of scanned documents.