Damnit
So my family isn't coming this weekend after all. To make a very long story short, there was an issue with the hotel and they couldn't get a room anywhere else (thank you Red Sox). I've spent most of the morning on the phone with my mom and different area hotels trying to set something up, and then with my mom trying to cheer her up and trying to work out another weekend for them to come. It will be tricky because it will be right before my sister has field hockey tryouts and also pretty close to when I go to Europe, but I think we might be able to swing it. All three of them at home are very grumpy and I'm pretty grumpy too. So....now what am I going to do this weekend (other than deal with shower planning and showing the apartment....)?
To help you sleep better....
#1 Just in case you were wondering what I'm up to this weekend (because I'm sure you all stay up all night pondering such questions), my family is coming to town. It's a little bit last minute, but they wanted to come sometime this summer and we suddenly realized this was the only weekend that would work. So-mom, dad and little sis will be here from tomorrow afternoon until Sunday. It should be a good time; I really enjoy seeing them (particularly my sister. I refer to her as mini-me. I might have to stop that now that she is getting older and is turning out to be quite athletic-she might hit me.) My mom comes to visit relatively often (sometimes with sis or mom's friends) and we have a shopping weekend, but it is very rare for the whole family to come. My dad does not like cities or crowds. Anyway-we're going to be tourists for the weekend-we're taking a duck tour and going to the aquarium and going to yummy restaurants. So it should be good times, but I won't be around much. We're also still going to be showing the apartment over the weekend.
#2 If you're looking for me, either here or at any other online venue-my boss will be out of town for the next two weeks, so I will have more free time. I think. In case you were pondering that one in the wee hours of the morning. (Aren't I helpful?)
#3 In case you were wondering what would be coming next here-here are the coming attractions: I've got a couple of drafts saved about random things (such as the four Bs post that I just did), but the first thing that I'll probably do is write a post called "Cast of Characters" giving a little detail about some of my friends who I refer to. I know that I got sidetracked a few weeks ago explaining who Iceland was and I have been specifically avoiding mentioning my friend JP lately to not get sidetracked with background again. JP is awesome, she definitely deserves a post. Oh-and she might start reading here soon, so we have to say nice things about her. :P
#4 (An addition based on a conversation that I had with my advisor in the middle of writing this pos) I just killed a paper to
Science. For the non-scientists out there,
Science is one of the top two scientific journals. Getting a paper into
Science is a huge deal. My advisor is one of the editors and he just came in with a paper that he wanted me to look at. I told him not to accept it (man I'm mean). It was pretty obvious that he didn't want to accept it, but he wanted some extra reasone why not. Honestly, it really wasn't worthy of
Science (not that any of my research is either) and it would have been one of those papers that I would have read and then thought self-why is this in
Science. The rejection will NOT help the authors sleep better. Oops. Maybe I should have told him to accept it just for thematic continuity.
Boys, bed, booze, and bitches
During formal rush sorority rush (at least at Duke) there are four topics that are off-limits when talking with potential members (though I never said that rule was FOLLOWED). These four things are known as "the four Bs": Boys (as in which fraternities the sorority parties with), Bed (the sexual exploits of sorority sisters), Booze (self-explanatory), and Bitches (bad-mouthing other sororities). These four topics, of course, are not off limits for sorority alumnae in blog posts. (Oh-and devil boy...these are precisely the kinds of things that I argued about with Kelly. :P)
Recent highlights in no particular order:
Bitches: I have one last bridesmaid stint coming up this year. I'm will be the maid of honor in my roommate's wedding. My roommate K (the one getting married) is wonderful and very laid-back and not a problem at all. A couple of her plans aren't 100% traditional (a relatively short engagement, having the wedding in the groom's nearby hometown instead of her halfway across the country hometown and not going to her hometown at all since she's been engaged) but they are all certainly reasonable. After all, it's her wedding. At the moment, there are only two other bridesmaids-one is our other roommate R., and the other is a friend from home. The thing is-thanks to some of the less-traditional decisions that she has made, the shower planning is not going entirely smoothly. I have already had a major battle with the girl from home(read: an email calling me mean, insensitive and a bitch and telling me that I don't understand weddings or pre-wedding planning), and I am now in contact with both bridesmaids, the groom's mother, and the bride's mother daily to try to pull together a surprise shower that will be two days before the wedding. We are currently on our fourth different plan, which is almost exactly my original plan. This may be entirely typical, but since it is the first time that I have to take the lead in organizing a shower, it seems insane to me. Anyway, it's certainly food for thought for me as far as how much K's decisions are affecting me and being a big pain in ways that I'm sure she never intended.
Booze: I got nothin here. I had a really good Cosmo this past weekend and I was planning on going to a trendy bar this coming weekend, but plans have since changed.
Bed: *sigh* Okay, I'll admit it. This one is a stretch used for writing purposes and has nothing to do with sexual exploits (There's a whole other category for that one.) Instead, I'm referring to the fact that just about every email in my inbox that doesn't say Re:shower says Re:apartment. Since K is getting married, she is also moving out, and we need to find someone to take her room. For September. We spent most of the past weekend showing her bedroom to people (aha, there's where bed comes in, for those of you who were still looking) and we may be continuing to do so on later this weekend/next week. It's frustrating in that I would like the whole thing settled, but it's also a little annoying that the timing last weekend worked out so that we pretty much just had to hang around the whole time-people weren't coming one right after the other, but they were spaced just enough to make it hard to fit anything else in the day. I'm really looking forward to having this one taken care of.
Hmmm...is there one more? Oh, right-boys. To make a long story short, they confuse me to no end. I must have missed the day where they handed out the manual. The good news, I suppose, is that I currently have a large group of male friends who I adore hanging out with and who are generally very attractive. The bad news is that one particular member of this group, who we will call "Marathon Man" for the purposes of this discussion thanks to the fact that he has runs marathons, emails and calls me often and wants to hang out a lot (takes me out to dinner often...but he seems to not really have noticed that I'm a girl. Very frustrating-but I suppose it could be worse right-we have a lot of fun together and he is certainly easy to look at. Ah well...I suppose I'll work out the boys issue eventually.
Feeling hot Hot HOT.
Once upon a time, there was a grad student in my lab named F. F. did some very old-school biochemistry/immunology experiments that were a little tricky and required the use of some very bad radioactivity. When F. was nearing completion of his thesis, our advisor decided that it was important to have someone in the lab that knew how to do/had experience in these tricky radioactive experiments. I was the
sucker most junior grad student in the lab at that time, so I was the lucky winner of this task. The experiment involves two parts-in one part you add very bad radioactivity to a peptide. Not only does this involve using a huge amount of VBR, but it also involves taking the VBR through an even worse super hazardous intermediate. As a consolation, you do get to wear a fun lead apron and work with lots of lead bricks in a special room and get a thyroid scan afterwards. As if THAT makes anyone feel better. The second part of the experiment involves taking your radioactively labelled peptide and seeing whether it binds to cells (sort of. That is a really simplified version). This part of the experiment is much better for you-you use far less radioactivity and it is always in a stable form, although you still do the experiment behind lead bricks. You can do the second part of the experiment ~10 times for each time you do the first, scary part. I learned how to do the first part by watching F. do it once, and I later perfected my technique on the second part by doing it many times. This process makes me "the expert" on the experiment, F. is long gone to a post-doc. I was taught about a year and a half ago.
E. now needs to learn this experiment, so I am "teaching" him (specifically, I am "teaching" him the first part today.) I put that in quotation marks because I don't know/remember how to do this part at all, having only watched F. do it once. We have the large quantity of very bad radioactivity in the lab right now and yesterday we tried to check out the "hot room" where we needed to work today and found out it was locked. To make a long story short-we've had quite the day trying to get this experiment set up (it took us hours of comical attempts at various steps) so that we can go upstairs and do the radioactive step. While E. was finishing the setup (attempt #3), I went upstairs to check the room. It's still locked. I then tried to track down the person in charge of radioactivity for the lab, and he made some calls. We are still trying to get someone from some other hospital department to give us access, so we can't do the experiment today. And I have other experiments planned tomorrow. So.....we are going to have to wait 'till Monday. I'm NOT really comfortable having that much very bad radioactivity just sitting around the lab all weekend, although it is properly shielded and protected and I know a weekend won't do much to the half-life.
While the lab radioactivity guy was making his calls, he talked to the hospital radiation safety office and they were chatting about the type of experiment that I was doing. There is currently some confusion and I'm waiting on an email, but it looks like I may need special radioactivity training (above and beyond normal lab radioactivity training) to do this experiment, which F. never mentioned. I'm sure he didn't do anything wrong purposefully and I doubt that I'd get in trouble for it, particularly since I'm taking care of the issue right away now that I've heard about it, but it sucks. We may be held up with the bad stuff festering in the fridge for even longer. If you see me glowing in the dark...this is why.
Supremely bored
I, unlike everyone else in the universe, have not yet commented on John Roberts, the nominee for the Supreme Court. The reason for that is that, honestly, I'm not really motivated to care. Seriously. Yeah, I know his opinion on French fries. I mean, it's not as if I like the guy. But the thing is, I wasn't going to like anyone who was nominated. The President wasn't going to up and pick someone who agreed with me on anything. It was absolutely certain that anyone who was chosen would be someone to whom I was violently opposed. The government will not be representing me with this appointment.
But...I don't care. It's almost as if they picked the most bland and boring blechy conservative man who is white and looks like the President that they could. He's a fucking POD person! Now I know why Bush et al. oppose cloning so much-they don't want us to find out their secrets. Anyway-blah. A non-descript conservative guy is going to be the new Supreme Court justice. Tell me something I don't know. Let's talk about something that actually is important right now. I'm sure this Roberts guy will end up being important eventually, but now he's just a blah pod non-descript conservative guy.
To best describe just how much I don't care...I've been reading about potential nominees for a couple months, but the first time this week that someone asked me what I thought about John Roberts and I replied with my opinion on Duke's new guard, Josh McRoberts. MUCH MORE INTERESTING.
Blatant thievery
from ExI. I'll be back after lunch to reply to
fan mail comments and emails and to finish the two posts that I've had saved as drafts for most of the week. As for the quiz...mostly accurate, although perhaps a bit too low on one parameter, but it didn't ask the right questions. Of course, being the nerd girl that I am, I like the graph.
EDITED TO ADD a few things...I had to take out the graph, because it was too big to fit correctly and it looked funny when I resized. So, you should definitely take the quiz yourself to see the science dork graph. Also, I am extremely glad that this site, unlike certain other sites, does not put a big red line of text on the top of posts every time they are edited, because this one would just be embarrassing.
the Wit
(60% dark, 34% spontaneous, 11% vulgar)your humor style:
CLEAN COMPLEX DARK
You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean you're pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that 'the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion.
Also, you probably loved the Office. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/.
PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais
My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: | You scored higher than 70% on dark | | You scored higher than 41% on spontaneous | | You scored higher than 0% on vulgar |
|
|
Stoopid grad student tricks
Every Wednesday afternoon we have a graduate student meeting in our lab. The grad students and the boss all get together and talk about the data that each student has generated over the past week as well as the implications of the data and the theory behind the data, etc. The meetings vary from benign to hard core-some days the boss is energetic about teaching us and starts to quiz us lots (which we joke means that he wants to play the "what is the advisor thinking" game) and other times the meetings are much more of a formality. There are certain rituals that happen...whenever he wants immunological background (most of the other students are virology students or medical students) he asks for my advice as "the card-carrying immunologist." Whenever someone starts to plow into an explanation of their data assuming everyone knows what's going on, he stops them and says "No, no, X (the name of the newest person) doesn't have a CLUE what you're talking about, start again, give background, and go slow and explain it to them. This is invariably a good skill to learn, but makes the new kid feel like an idiot for a while. Another ritual involves what happened today. Whenever there are new people, when there are visiting students just coming to check the place out, or sometimes just when he is having a very enthusiastic day, we have to do tricks. Today, the boss was enthusiastic over a new grant and we had a new student and a visiting student, so it was particularly bad. On these occasions, our dear advisor delights in asking us difficult theory questions for an enormous amount of time, largely designed to make us show off our knowledge of the field, history, whatever to show the outsiders just how smart we are and how well we can reason and all that stuff (presumably to show them what a great learning environment our lab is) As a result, these meetings serve only to exhaust the current students and to terrify the new students, who are told repeatedly that they obviously don't have a clue about what anyone is talking about and who are constantly on edge that they too will be called on.
Today: We talked about the projects of 2 of the 4 current graduate students in the room for 45 minutes each. (Usually we spend maybe 15 minutes per project) Frankly, we were lucky that there were some people missing or it could have gone on all night. He was relentless. At one point he asked me a question and then said: "Eh, let's hear her try to answer that nasty question and hang herself." (Important note: I got it right.) At another point, I mentioned a vague possible reason for an observation that a fellow student had made, and his response was:
"Okay, now imagine that I have David Baltimore, Fred Alt, and Tonegawa sitting next to me (All Nobel-caliber immunologists). How would they answer that question? Actually, since I'm not sure everyone in the room knows the historical context-so why don't you tell them why each of those three people are important and then how they would answer the question."
I answered.
"Good. Now what if I added Laurie Glimcher. What would she say?"
I answered.
"Exactly correct. Now what about Benaceraff?"
I answered. I was wrong. But anyway, you can see that this was not graduate-student meeting lite.
Bad news: we will likely have a new student each of the next three or four weeks, so we'll be doing renditions of stoopid grad student tricks for a while now.
I suppose the only good part is that he stopped calling me "the card-carrying immunologist" and started calling me "the senior card-carrying immunologist," which is weird since the other immunology student was not there and since I was really the second most senior student in the room. But hey, upward movement is good, right?
Huh?
As you may have noticed, I have pretty strong feelings about public health measures against infectious diseases, particularly vaccine development and HIV. I've been interested in those issues, both in terms of science and in terms of the social, political etc. ramifications of the epidemic for a long time. Blah blah blah, I could tell you all my intesnse feelings on this matter for ever and ever, but I won't make this any longer.
Today I received a couple of emails about AIDS research, one of which an ordinary email from amfAR and the second was from the One campaign. Now, I adore the One campaign. A lot. I would even love it if Brad Pitt and Bono weren't involved.
The One Campaign asked me to call my Senators to ask them to support an amendment about funding the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Okay. Cool!! I'm all about such an amendment. But....I'm more than slightly confused. For one, the email is worded in a somewhat confusing manner. It sounds like the money that the amendment is going for might not be enough to cover the fund. Also.....this amendment was proposed by two Senators, one of whom is RICK SANTORUM????? Huh???? Since when is Santorum doing something that I would like in any way, shape, or form? What is HIS motivation for this? It doesn't sound like his sort of thing at all. Is there some sort of unknown part of this that I'm not seeing? Are there two Senator Santorums from Pennsylvania? Anyway-if you know what the deal is, please let me know. I really feel like there is something fishy about this whole thing, but I can't figure out what it is. Anyone?
Just as an FYI....I've got one more deeper post to write within the next day or so. It will likely happen tonight when I have access to stuff at home, instead of here at lab.
They showed us the money
I think I've mentioned the "big grant" that my lab was in the running for on the blog (I know I've mentioned it to a few of you in person, anyway). Well, we got it. (Yeah, this happened last week and you may have read about it in some of your other media places already, but here is some info, if not. If you HAVE heard about it and have questions, let me know. ;-) I might just have a lot more info.....
Anyway, this is extremely exciting for the HIV Vaccine field as a whole, and of course for the members of our particular team, which won the award to create the center.
From Harvard Medical School Office of Public Affairs:
FOUR HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL RESEARCHERS PART OF $300 MILLION NIH CENTER FOR HIV RESEARCH CONSORTIUM
BOSTON - Four Harvard Medical School faculty will serve in leadership roles within the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI), a consortium of universities and academic medical centers established today by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The center's goal will be to solve major problems in HIV vaccine development and design. B.H., MD, a professor at Duke University Medical Center, will head the initiative.
CHAVI will receive $15 million in its first year and may receive more than $300 million in the next seven years, according to the NIH. CHAVI's mission is to address major obstacles to HIV vaccine development and to design, develop and test novel HIV vaccine candidates. The award transforms HIV research in the U.S. into a cooperative and collaborative system. Two of the four senior scientific leadership positions will be filled by N. L., MD, HMS professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; and J.S., MD, HMS professor of pathology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Along with H., these leaders will be responsible for the overall scientific work conducted by CHAVI. They will direct CHAVI research in their own labs and may also form research partnerships between CHAVI and other academic and
industrial labs around the world. Three of the five research core activities will be filled by S. H., PhD, HMS professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology and of pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School; R. D., MD, HMS Dean for Academic and Clinical Programs and professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and BIDMC; and Dr. L.. S. H. will lead the Structural Biology Core, R.D. will lead the Clinical Core, and N.L., also a scientific leader, will head the Vaccine Production Core.The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, established CHAVI in response to recommendations of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, a virtual consortium endorsed by world leaders at a G-8 summit in June 2004. The Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise was originally proposed by NIAID director A. F., H., and almost two dozen other prominent HIV vaccine researchers and public health officials in a June 2003 commentary in Science magazine. CHAVI researchers will focus on solving several unanswered questions about HIV, including how it infects the body in its earliest stages; designing, developing, and testing improved vaccines; and evaluating promising HIV vaccine candidates in small-scale clinical trials. CHAVI will also fund a large-scale study to determine how the immune system of the macaque monkey fends off SIV, the macaque equivalent of HIV. Approximately 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS globally, and the rate of new HIV infections continues to exceed 13,000 per day, according to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. Although AIDS drugs have extended the lives of many in wealthy nations, according to global health experts an effective HIV vaccine would be an extremely valuable addition to the comprehensive prevention strategies necessary to halt the spread of HIV in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe, as well as other parts of the world. In addition to the H. and the HMS researchers, the CHAVI senior scientific leaders include G. S., MD, PhD; of the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine; and A.M., MD, of Oxford University, Oxford, UK. The two other core roles will be filled by D. G., MD, of Duke University; and M. C., MD, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. CHAVI will be a "virtual consortium" consisting of a collaborative group of scientists at multiple sites - research centers, universities, and companies - around the world. In future years, CHAVI may also solicit and support high-priority new ideas and discovery efforts from the research community.
Wow. That was easy.
As you well know, I've spent tons of time recently writing a report, reading papers and preparing and re-preparing slides for my meeting with my thesis committee today. It was scheduled for 3-5, and I finally finished making my polished slides that were ready to present this morning. I've lost lots of sleep and done few fun things for the past few weeks all in anticipation of.....this?
It was really, really easy. Piece of cake. I was a little nervous at the beginning of the talk, but I calmed down quickly when I realized that they weren't being mean. They had some suggestions, were like "This was good." and then they left. At 4:10.
I kind of feel silly for having been so stressed and nervous. And I don't even feel relieved, because it was so unstressful that I can't say "Whew. That was over." Oh well, that is one less thing to stress about-now TAC meetings are just another thing I have to do.
Now....I'm just waiting around to go to the bar. (We didn't plan to leave till 5:30, since we weren't sure exactly how long it would be). YAY!!!!!!! (Mmm $2 drafts and test tube shots. Especially test tube shots.)
Tomorrow will be a very chill lab day (not much planned, will likely slack quite a bit) and then I am going to get Harry Potter at midnight (well, I think we are drinking first) Saturday will be read Harry Potter day, and then Sunday I might go shopping. :) :) :) :) :) This weekend is going to rock!
Update
This has been the longest week ever, and it's only Wednesday morning. I stayed up all night Sunday night to finish writing the progress report (it didn't turn out well, but it did exist, so that was good.) and to finish putting together the Powerpoint presentation. I gave the talk in lab meeting on Monday morning as a practice for tomorrow. I was pretty much hammered with questions, which I certainly did not enjoy with the lack of sleep. It was not a good feeling at all-I did get a lot of suggestions, but I didn't entirely appreciate having all of the holes in my project pointed out just a few days before I have to present again, when I certainly don't have enough time to fix them. Ever since then, I've been running around the lab like crazy trying to deal with my experiments and fix the presentation. I'm meeting with the boss in a few minutes to go over it again and I am planning on spending the rest of the day on the computer working on it. I'm annoyed that I don't have as many changes made as I'd like (as in, some of the changes the boss wanted are not yet done) but I absolutely had to do laundry and run a couple errands last night so that I didn't end up in front of my committee in sweatpants with unwashed hair.
My post-meeting plans include heavy drinking Thursday night (yay $2 drafts and test tube shots), lab on Friday (it is one of my closest lab peep's last day, or else I would take it off), and then drinking/Harry Potter/catching up on sleep this weekend. I am very much looking forward to all of it. As far as emails (and comments here, which I count in that category since they go to my email box)-you will all get replies on Friday, when I am here in the lab chilling. I should get the template changes done then too. (What, you thought I was going to come into the lab
and actually do real work on Friday? Ha.)
The unintended side benefit to a couple months of constant travel followed by constant work, leading me to being at the end of my rope with stress and busy-ness? I'm wearing my skinny jeans today. :)
CRAP!!!!!!
All I wanted to do was to make the pink go away. I don't do pink, and it has been bugging me all along, but I liked the picture since it was Boston. Anyway-I tried to change it NOW for a variety of reasons, and now I have a different picture, Carolina blue, and I lost my links. Crap. I actually have to go pay attention to my cells now, so it will have to persist in this unhappiness for a little while longer, but then I'll work on fixing it, and I'll let you know how the work is going...
I suppose this is good, since I wanted to update the links anyway.....
So THAT'S what's wrong with me...
(Before I start out and you discover the lameness that inherent in the above title, please realize that my alternate title was A-TAC, which would have been funny to three other people, at most, and likely only me. So deal with it.)
Have I told you about my friend Iceland? I think that I have, but if not: Iceland is one of the other graduate students in my lab. He is the most senior grad student that we have (well, not counting the one who has graduated recently and is moving on the 15th) and is a good friend. Iceland is actually an MD/PhD student, meaning that he has studied medicine before starting in graduate school (technically he is the same year in grad school that I am) and is kinda sorta doctor-ish. He constantly claims to have no medical knowledge (particularly when we are having some sort of grad studenty discussion in the lab and someone asks ME a question that results in the answer "How should I know? Ask Iceland. He's the doctor.") and he looks terrified if I actually ask him a medical question, whether I am joking or serious. Today, however, he offered me an unsolicited diagnosis.
According to Iceland, I have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
You see, I have recently been preparing for a meeting with my thesis committee (or in Harvard-speak: my TAC), as mentioned previously. My meeting is set for the afternoon of the 14th. At said meeting, I shall regale my TAC with the lovely data that I have generated over the course of the past year...or something. The TAC is composed of three faculty members plus my advisor. These three faculty members were the same three that administered my qualifying exam a year ago. At that meeting, I had to defend a 10-page proposal of what I was planning to do my thesis research on that I had turned in to them a week before. It would be an extreme understatement to say that my qualifying exam went badly. Yes, I passed, but it was pretty much the worst experience that I've ever had.
My TAC meeting will be somewhat similar to the quals...the same three faculty members will be there to examine my progress over the past year. I will be giving a presentation on this data to supplement a written document given to the faculty members before the meeting. The major difference is that my advisor will be present, which is good because I am certain that my advisor will ensure that nothing TOO bad happens. In the past year, I have given a number of talks on my research to much larger and more intimidating groups and they have all gone well: in fact the process of putting together my talk was really easy, since I just had to update and slightly change a talk that I gave in April. Graduate students have TAC meetings all the time. So...what's the big deal? (Well, besides the fact that all of the work that I have done thus far was on the part of the project that the committee HATED and advised me to drop)
Apparently I look like hell, which caused Iceland to come talk to me (and diagnose me with either "amagdyla issues" about the whole thing, or Post-traumatic stress disorder. (Please note, I am not making light of PTSD, I just think it is funny that he decided that was my problem) because it went so badly. What's my problem? It's this written document that I have to turn in before the meeting. I have no earthly idea what I am supposed to be doing.
If you would have asked me before I actually was on the clock with a TAC meeting scheduled, I would have said that I needed to write a report of what I've done over the past year and turn it in a week before the exam (which astute readers will note, would be today) I've asked other students and my advisor what I was expected to do and their replies included:
"A page"
"My last one was 60 pages"
"I think that Karen just printed off her slides once"
"Basically, you're writing the paper for all this data" (This was the opinion of both my advisor and Iceland)
"Just a quick summary-I mean, they aren't going to read a lot and they are going to see your slides."
As for when it is due?
"Before the meeting"
"With enough time for them to read it before the meeting"
According to the two "official" publications of our program...here's the deal:
1. "The student should present a brief written summary of his/her research activities during the time period since the last TAC meeting to each of the TAC members, and to the program office."
2. "Prior to each meeting with their review committee the student must prepare a written progress report summarizing the status of his/her research project."
The person in charge of the program has been out of town when I've gone to see her. This is a very odd situation for me: I am used to pretty constant (often too constant) guidance. My advisor is extremely hands on, but he is currently in the midst of working on a large grant (his assistant has put a countdown till the duedate on his office door so he has to look at it all the time. A few months ago he wrote a grant that was worth more than 10 times the previous largest grant I'd ever heard of. I can't even imagine what the deal is with this one). He will not have time to read my report thing-y, which is somewhat stressful in that it will go off into the void with no oversight, but also somewhat nice in that it can go out in perhaps a form that is acceptible to others but not up to his perhaps unreasonable standards.
Anyway....I'm totally freaked out about it. Obviously, it's not done yet. This may be the first time in my life that I have not turned something in by its due date (if there ever actually was a hard due date) I've pretty much decided that it will get handed in on Monday (which fits all criteria that I can see). I've worked on it sparingly for a while now, but I really only started putting in the someone-lit-a-fire-under-my-ass/research and write a huge paper during an all-nighter type of effort that I'm used to today. I've made a lot of progress and it will definitely be done then and then my life will be relatively better. I'm really, really frustrated with myself, though. I mean, it's a PROGRESS REPORT for goodness sake. Not a stressful event. Probably not in the top 5 most important things that I will write in grad school. Yet, I fell apart a little over it. Fuck. I'm just hoping that this will be like all of the talks that I've given...once I do it the first time, all of the subsequent ones are modifications of the first one until the whole process becomes old hat. So.....that's what's up here. Sorry to be such a downer...but I thought I'd at least assure you that I hadn't fallen off the face of the Earth.
