When your advisor tries to kill your thesis
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.