I will say, having to do the literature review first and a decent amount of time before the research proposal is due helps a lot. Sure, some of us have a bit of editing to but that main chunk of our paper is completed.
Looking and thinking about the paper as a whole is completely overwhelming, especially when you think about how many points the paper is worth. For me, what has been helping is taking it step by step and trying to knock out a certain section at a time.
I went through the step by step how to write an empirical article and just outlined what I planned to talk about in them; like who my participants will be and what measures I’d use to gather the information. That’s kind of given me the reassurance that I’m not entirely lost when it comes to this project.
Then, I started knocking out by writing the paper one section at a time. I worked and wrote out how I planned to get participants to join, by which method and where. I tried to get as detailed as possible with that section. Then, I moved onto things that dealt with that, primarily where I set up my questionnaires and surveys and now am slowly going into what the surveys look like: what questions are involved and how they are going to be handed out.
I think that’s the biggest thing about that I can do to keep myself calm about this paper and not stressed out is to take it one piece at a time so it’s not this overwhelming massive paper that I’m facing. Instead, it’s just one piece of the puzzle I have to put together every time I work on it.
Justyna Wolek 