admin May 29th, 2008
So I met in person with crazy advisor yesterday and suddenly he is no longer crazy. He was happy and friendly and told me that things were on track and that my dissertation was even stronger now, and oh, go ahead and see about getting a new date. I suppose that this is what people mean when they say that things are completely misinterpreted via email. Or maybe I really am insane.
This is why one should never get emotional in an email. It can be completely misinterpreted, and the forward button is a click away. I am so glad that I didn’t send any of the venting emails I was itching to send and vented here instead.
On the pregnancy front I am still having a pretty easy time, though my back still isn’t all that happy about recent developments. I will really miss feeling all these movements when my son is born. I bet the pharmaceutical companies could make good money with a pill that simulates fetal movement. Or is that called gas? Please ye fates, let these favorable conditions continue.
And here I would like to take a second to appeal to all those very kind people who send the pregnant lady baby gifts. First of all, thank you. You are very kind and thoughtful and she is really touched that you sent her things for the baby. Secondly, please do not send the pregnant lady 500 newborn clothes. Know that everyone else has sent her 500 newborn clothes as well. They are all so tiny and cute that she will keep them all knowing some will never get worn and then after a few months her baby will have to run around in loincloths stitched from the 50 receiving blankets she received.
My career decisions are in limbo until this dissertation thing is done. Apparently my stipend really does make a difference to our finances. More to come on this later. Now it is back to work.
admin May 28th, 2008
So I am having a pretty tough time. My advisor seems to think that I am out to subvert him. Really, I just want to make him happy so that I can get out of here. I am under enormous stress. He just sent me a two paragraph admonition for using one word rather than another in a single sentence in my second chapter. I am REALLY hoping that our email communication is being somewhat misinterpreted by me, and he’s really not as mad as I think he is.
I just don’t understand what happened. We had a scientific disagreement, and after futilely arguing my point, I backed down and agreed to change. Now he seems to think I am wholly untrustworthy and that all of my work is no good. Just a few weeks ago he thought the highest of me and now it seems that I am a rouge student, or maybe just incredibly stupid?
I keep hearing that this will end, that it will be OK, that I just need to do what is necessary and it will be over. I can’t keep from stressing out about all this anyway. It is not the extra work, or the fact that I have to draw conclusions I’m not sure about, it is the loss of respect of someone I respected and trusted that really gets to me. And I have no idea how to get it back.
My advisor has decided that he will need to re-read the entire document to make sure that I say the right things before sending it out to my committee. So far I have only received notice about the offending word. I sent initial revisions it out to him in haste, hoping he would read it quickly so that could set a new date. I also hoped to let him know that I was actually changing things, despite his worries of my subversion. Now I am in fear now of other small errors that he will find due to my hurry.
I spent all my holiday working on this, and worrying about it so much that I didn’t sleep. Then I read about how bad stress is for your baby. So I stress out about stressing out the baby. Then I stress out that the stress will make the baby come early or that my defense will be much later, and I’ll really be screwed then. If I wasn’t so close to the end I’d quit.
I know that a PhD is not nor is supposed to be easy. I know that the dissertation and defense are a trial for every one. I just didn’t think it was supposed to be a personally degrading experience. I thought that work and preparation would serve me as they always have. I didn’t think it would be about personalities and egos. I thought that prior excellence would hold me through even difficult trials. Is this the way it is with other people? Have other people met these sorts of difficulties? My husband says my advisor is an ass, but he’s not. Until now I have really liked him. People don’t just become an ass overnight. So is something wrong with me? Am I really as horrible as he makes me feel? Please someone tell me that I am not the only one with these experiences.
admin May 16th, 2008
So the result is (hopefully) only a slight delay in defending. Personally I’d love to go into labor during it. That would show ‘em.
It seems that my advisor thinks that his paper has completely refuted the generally accepted beliefs about this process, and so now the burden of proof has changed and all further papers must do similar experiments to PROVE this is going on. I disagree, but am doing the experiments to make him happy. I think they are flawed experiments, and so will most likely be revising my dissertation to say things that I don’t really believe, but hey if it will get me out of here I’ll do it.
Academia in action, folks. It’s not about the science, it’s about who has the most power and who can be the most stubborn and arrogant.
admin May 15th, 2008
I have been working for many years now primarily to nail down a very elusive process. I have written several papers outlining experiments in which this process seems to be at work, and done analysis to show that it is at least a possibility in my systems. Both of my advisors have of course received and read each of these papers, or at least said that they did. All of these published papers include their names in the list of authors.
One of my advisors decided a few years ago that he just doesn’t believe in this process, and worked with another student to publish a paper that he believes “unambiguously” demonstrates that this process does not (cannot) occur for a system similar to mine. Now, while this paper was published and has much merit, there are some places where controls are not properly done, etc. so that although no one really tells him this, the work is hardly regarded as unambiguous. When we ask the student who wrote the work about such specific questions or whether these experiments were done, they have no answer. Also, this system and the parameters are different in some ways from mine, so even if the results were conclusive, they are not perfectly applicable.
Fast forward to well, now. It is a week before I defend to my committee and a week after I submitted my dissertation to my advisors for a preview check. This advisor has just contacted me saying that he has serious reservations regarding what I say in there and wants to meet to discuss. I find myself getting very defensive. This is the work that I have been doing for a long time. I make a very strong case based on calculation, simulation, experiments, and literature review. Maybe if he had been paying attention to anything going on he would have been alerted to this earlier. Now I am really afraid that despite my meticulous work, his personal biases and arrogance will force me either to attempt to rewrite my dissertation with less than a week until I defend, or push back my graduation to next month in which time I will be both a mother and cut off from funding.
This is so frustrating.