My Thesis: A New Hope^*

I've blogged here a bit about the trials of trying to get on top of my thesis, and the challenges I've had with getting my advisors to help me now that I'm ready to be more pro-active. Honestly, I've been ready to give up over the past few months, and really have only been working half-assed on my research.

Enter a senior scientist in my lab (SSIML). I ran into SSIML at a meeting last December, and he asked how my thesis was going. I answered, "I might finish sometime." He then gave me the look. You know, that look that says, "you can't give up now". I continued, before he could give me the "you've put so much time into this" speech. "I'm just not getting the support I need from certain various people." I didn't name names, because one of my advisors happened to be standing about 10 feet away. "Certain people in this room?" SSIML asked. "Yup," I replied. "Come see me," SSIML said.

I had a meeting with my advisors the next day, and as usual, that meeting bolstered my faith that we would start meeting more often, and that they would start supporting me in my research more.

That was short lived.

I've met with them once since December. Once. It's April. Oh, and one of my advisors has not even acknowledged receiving the acceptance letter of our paper. In three weeks. (Granted, she had a scheduled vacation this month, but didn't actually tell me when that was. I'm just e-mailing a black hole and hoping it gets to her eventually.)

So, I finally talked with SSIML. I poked my head in his office a few weeks ago, and he suggested that we start to meet weekly at first, and then go from there. Weekly. I nearly did the happy dance in his office, but decided that that might scare him off.

Since then, I've met with him twice. I've looked at my data closer in the last three weeks than I had in the last year. He's helped me to understand my sources more than I've been able to glean from countless journal articles, giving me a context in which to put these sources as I read more journal articles. He's also helped me to figure out why a couple are not showing good results. Oh, and I've found an "interesting" result. Do you know how long its been since I've seen an interesting result? I got a little thrill when I saw the numbers, and even said "That's interesting." I got an even bigger thrill when SSIML said "that's interesting" when he saw the numbers.

For the first time in about a year, I'm actually excited about my research. I've even been working on fitting some spectra this evening...Friday evening. Go figure.

^*As a colleague at work put it.