Plausible Accuracy

When Mrs. PA successfully defended her thesis, I thought it might finally light a fire under me to push through whatever I needed to in order to finish up here so we could get on with our lives.  Instead, I’ve found myself in a more or less continuous state of ennui.  I have no motivation or interest to work on my thesis project.  Partly it’s because I don’t really believe that it will ever generate results, and therefore I don’t really see the point of even trying.  I know that this sort of defeatism is not unusual among graduate students, but I’m having a hard time yanking myself out of it.  I can’t even manage to use the reasoning “just finish it and you can get out of here” as enough impetus to apply myself.

On some level I feel like my reserve of “well it didn’t work that time, let’s tweak the parameters and try again” has just run out.  The “reward” from a scientific standpoint is more or less the same whether I actually do the experiments or not, because the experiments never work.

I think this is made worse by my particular situation.  Most graduate students at this stage would have enough data to just sort of drag themselves across the finish line.  Since I had to change projects, I’m left sitting in the middle of a pile of half-completed projects and seemingly intractable problems with each of them.

I really wish I could think of a way to snap myself out of this funk.  I know that it’s not helpful in any way.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 12:24 pm and is filed under graduate school, practice of life, practice of science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.