Monday, February 28, 2005

Give yourself credit

My horrorscope said to "give myself credit", so here goes:

my paper got in today.

I am SO relieved.

And then, literally just as I finished reading the email and went to give my advisor a thank-you hug for being my moral support, my student showed up. So, I celebrated by teaching her how to do a transfection, and then we went to lunch and talked about the goods and bads of science, very openly. She knows, because her father does some research. And I really do believe that students should go in with their eyes open, if they are going to go into research.

And regarding a previous blog, I don't think I said this outright, but I think that it ultimately hurts everybody to recruit students on false pretenses. They just end up quitting anyway, somewhere down the line, or they end up miserable and make everyone around them miserable, too.

I know, because I worked for someone like that. And I have worked with plenty of students and postdocs like that. They are no fun to work with.

Science is bad enough, even when you're pretty sure you want to be in it!

Sigh. Anyway.... didn't get much done today, but THAT'S OK. Today I just say, I worked hard for this, that particular saga is OVER.

Except, I have to send hard copies for color matching. Argh. Must go get special paper for color printer....

CAN'T WAIT TO SEE IT IN PRINT!!!

And I'm sure it's not the last saga, but boy did I learn a lot! I am a big believer in the motto: try not to make the same mistakes over and over again, try to make new ones. Research is great for that. So many mistakes to be made... so little handbook.

Moving on to new horizons, new potential pitfalls and all.... a change in the scenery.

Hope you all had a great Monday, or at least a bearable one.

2 Comments:

At 7:28 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Congratulations! Well regarding grad school, someone once said to me "the Ph.D. program is nothing but an effort to avoid attrition". There is an interesting article about this that I read about a year ago on The Chronicle of Higher Ed. that can be found here: http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i19/19a01001.htm

There is also an initiative underway to examine student attrition (http://www.phdcompletion.org/information/index.asp) I wonder how successful it will be. Haven't we been trying to reform the program for the last 20 yrs? Duke is involved in this study and printed a brief report of this study in their grad student newsletter (http://www.cgsnet.org/pdf/Jan-Feb2005.pdf)

 
At 6:22 AM, Blogger kiara said...

Congrats on your paper !!! :)

 

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