Plausible Accuracy

I seem to have made my first major mistake since the crapload of work that is late-stage Ph.D. life descended.

As I was writing contact letters to the first couple of potential post-doc advisors, I realized that I needed to clean my CV up a bit.  Part of this included adding references to the end, just as a common courtesy.  I was pretty sure who I was going to ask for letters of reference, and didn’t anticipate any problems, so I put the names in and made a mental note to meet with the faculty and make sure to formally clear it with them.  Want to guess what in my busy schedule I forgot to do?

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and a contact with a potential post-doc advisor is going well.  They tell me they want to meet, and “oh by the way I’ll be contacting your references”.  “Shit”, I think, “I never got to meet with them”.  In a panic I’m reduced to sending out an email with a blindside warning that “hey I put you down as a reference without clearing it first and someone will be contacting you”.  In other words, I’m an ass.

Rightly, I got reamed out by one of my potential references/committee members.  It’s one of those moments that make you feel terribly ashamed (once again justifiably so).  I’m sure everyone’s got a few of them.  All I could do was say “you are exactly right, I did the wrong thing and I take full responsibility”.  In a way it’s refreshing - a problem in my life these days that has an obvious “wrong” and and obvious “right”.  It’s just too bad that I was on the wrong side.

Lessons learned hard are lessons learned best, I suppose, but that doesn’t make them any easier or keep me from laying awake at night kicking myself over it.

Just a few songs that I love and have some odd association with graduate school for one reason or another.  Have some of your own?  Post them in the comments!

They Might Be Giants - Dr. Worm

Jonathan Coulton - Code Monkey

Jonathan Coulton - Skullcrusher Mountain

Andrew Bird - Opposite Day

Atmosphere - Smart went Crazy (explicit)

Deltron 3030 - Mastermind

Keller Williams - Kidney in a Cooler
(No good video found, sorry)

Psyche Origami - Visit to the Shrink’s Office
(No good video found, sorry)

The Mountain Goats - This Year

My committee meeting really seems to have shifted things into a gear that I wasn’t even really aware existed.  Every day is another round of working on whatever I can manage to find time/motivation for and trying as much as possible to move things out the door.  I’ve been taking steps to try and get myself organized - relying more on a Google Calendar, buying a small notebook for jotting down “To-Do” items, etc, but I’m definitely starting to feel the effects of being pulled in too many directions.  I got temporarily lost 3 times yesterday in our building haha.

The major problem is really one of prioritization, which I’m still struggling with.  It seems that the things I want to do are write on my thesis and apply for post-docs, when I probably should be doing experiments or analyzing data.

I spoke with a good friend of mine the other day, who has recently started a positiong as a new faculty member.  It gave me a bit of perspective on how busy my schedule really is.  It’s hard to imagine all of the things on a young faculty member’s plate; ordering lab equipment, selecting students, writing grants, preparing courses to teach, actually doing research… It’s fairly mind-boggling.  I would ask him to do a guest post here, but I’m afraid he’d bite my head off for asking him to take the time to do it :)

I decided that sooner rather than later was better with regards to contacting post-doc labs.  I cleaned up my CV (done in LaTeX, of course!), carefully composed an email, and sent it along to the professor.

Now begins the worrying again!

It was very hard choosing which lab to approach.  There are several that, although they are working in sort of separate fields, are also doing work that is very interesting and exciting.  In the end the decision on who to contact first came down to the question of “what do I think I’d like to do after the post-doc”.  I decided that now was a good time to try and expand my experience and give a bit of a push back towards the fundamental things I enjoy.

Of course I’ll update if and when I hear back…  Until then, stay tuned.

I try to keep politics off the blog, but now I just can’t resist. This clip is too good:

Now that I’m (mostly) past my second committee meeting, it’s time to get cracking on the end-game work.  I’ve been neglecting writing on my thesis for a bit, as I was busy in the lab trying to wrap up a few experiments to present.

There isn’t any more time to procrastinate on the writing front.  I’ve currently got 8 chapters in my thesis, and none of them have a completed draft yet.  With my defense planned for 6 months away, I need to produce 1.33 chapters a month between now and then.  My main issue is that I don’t tend to bang out a single chapter and move on, but instead dabble here or there depending on what I’m in the mood to write.  This means that I’ve gotten a start on just about every chapter (save the summary, which I probably will sit down and bang out), but none of them are in a “complete unit” that I can start handing to my advisor for proofreading/editing.

On other fronts, I’m narrowing down the professors that I’m likely to contact initially for potential post-doc positions.  At the moment I think I’ve got it down to two, and so I’m reading papers in order to familiarize myself with their research.  Hopefully within a week or so I’ll be able to compose contact letters and get the ball rolling in that department.

At the same time, I’m trying to implement some of the experiments that my committee and I discussed in the meeting.  There isn’t anything terribly complicated about this per se, but it’s just one more direction that my focus is being pulled in.

As I’ve said in previous posts, I’m beginning to think that this ability to effectively multitask is the main thing I’ve had to learn here at the end of my graduate career.  When you are a younger graduate student, you can afford to devote all of your energy and cranial juice into your research project.  This isn’t the case as you approach graduation.