After putting it off for far too long, I finally had “the talk” with my graduate advisor.  We went over Mrs. PA’s job offer, our lease situation, the status of my project, and the data I’ve obtained so far, and came up with a pretty concrete plan for getting me out of here

with my Ph.D.

I’m really happy now. I’ve got a lot of work to do of course, so my excitement is muted by the sheer stack of things to do, but it’s still one of the better results I could have hoped for.

A lot of our discussion centered around the two things about my work that has troubled me.  First of all, that it’s not a “coherent narrative”.  I’ve worked on several different things which are only weakly related to one another.  I had/have this idea that a Ph.D. project is one grand overarching story, and that’s not what I’ve got under my belt at all.  My advisor seems to feel more that it’s about what you learn and how you solve problems, and therefore I’m ok in this area.  The second thing that worries me is somewhat related to the first: none of my projects have a “punchline”.  I’ve gotten a fair amount of preliminary data in all of them, but there isn’t that final kicker to seal it off nicely.  We came up with a project plan that will almost definitely give me data that fits this bill within the next couple of months at most.  In the meantime I can continue with my work on solving a protein structure, which I’d like to get done but has no guaranteed chance to succeed.

All in all, I’m not sure that it could have gone better.  My advisor really seemed to be supportive and interested in helping me out as much as possible.  Now I’ve just got to buckle down and get the job done.  It is a bit easier when I can circle a date on the calendar and know that graduate school will be done after that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 3:37 pm and is filed under career, graduate school, practice of life. 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.