Posted by Lindenblüte on October 16, 2006, at 20:51:59
RANT ALERT
Tomorrow morning I have to try to get an ancient professor to understand a study I'm proposing. She's well on her way to sinility. Yet, she still demands accountability. Ususally, I'm GREAT with dealing with her, but that's because I would do my usual trick of smiling on the outside, and being outraged and angry on the inside. I have to explain things ten thousand times , and then on the ten thousandth time, she totally loses her patience and asks me why I'm repeating myself?
Because you asked me to? Because you were falling asleep the last 10 times I told you? Because you can't bother reading the short proposal with 5 bullet points I have prepared for your porous and inconsistent mind.
Oh. and then she'll do this thing: she'll actually get up from her stinky slouch and say "You know what YOUR problem is Li? You just get lost in the details [or "you only see the big picture"] or whatever random assessment she wants to give me.
There will be another professor there. My dissertation advisor. She may or may not decide to back me up. Frankly I don't give a flying f*ck about this project. I'm only assembling the equipment and designing the experiment because my advisor figures that this is the most outstanding experiment we can run now (state of the art ca. 1990).
And Science Advances. One stinking useless meeting after another.
Next meeting. T. I don't even know what we're going to talk about. I'll probably be decompressing from the morning meeting.
Next meeting. With narcissistic colleague and my advisor. I have to respond to three different critiques of a study that took significant portions of three years of my and narcissistic colleague's lives.
It's going to be a blast.
I have to read our paper again. And mark it- I have three pens prepared. one for critique one (mild) one for critique two (constructive) one for critique three (scathing, ultimately revealing that this peer reviewer has more axe to grind than substance on which to base his/her personal attacks.)
Dissertation advisor will suggest ten follow-up studies we can do to eliminate all possible confounds, while forgetting that we cannot simultaneosuly control for all confounding variables. There will ALWAYS be an alternate explanation. That's why we ran nine iterations of the experiment already. I can never figure out why diss. advisor is much more worried about pleasing some random reviewer than pleasing her two most advanced graduate students. Is it so much to ask that she actually take into account the fact that We need to WRAP this STUDY UP- not expand it into a major research protocol?
I'm outta this uni as soon as I get my hood. Li in the hood. oh yeah.
Oh. Did I mention that narcissistic colleague doesn't give a sh*t about this paper anymore? She's too busy studying for some random class that is her "hobby"
BRavo all around. You know what? my 4th meeting of the day, I'm going to bring my laptop and play on the internet for 2 hours and walk out if it's not worth my precious time.
yeah?
poster:Lindenblüte
thread:695418
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/work/20060706/msgs/695418.html