Struggling with research ennui
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.
May 28th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
[...] anyway, guess I am going back to one other blog for reference: Plausible Accuracy. I have no motivation or interest to work on my thesis project. Partly it’s because I don’t [...]