The devil is in the details

What a day (week)

It's been quite the crap-tastic week here. All in all, I have spent my time largely doing things that will not be contributing to my timely graduation whatsoever, like fighting (and losing) battles over space, coordinating the schedule of large group meetings, being thwarted in my attempts to use machines and computers that I needed to use (and then later finding out that people "forgot" to un-sign up for them) and doing things to help other people. The helping other people part I don't mind so much, because I generally like the people whom I am helping, but it certainly contributes to my feeling that I am getting little done and feeling slightly undervalued. Add to it the fact that I just had a meeting with the boss where we decided that the majority of the experiments that I HAVE been doing lately were crap, and that I should cut and run since the boss is feeling "a lack of forward progress." Ugggh. That's good news in a way since it means that I can theoretically do one more experiment and then write a paper, moving myself that closer to graduation (and onto a potentially more fruitful part of my project), but it involves an awful lot of "ifs"...if the next experiment works, if the paper gets published, etc. etc. Realistically, I know that everything will be okay and that this is just one of the short-term downs of graduate school, but I can't entirely shake the feeling that I'm turning into a former graduate student in the lab who sort of lingered here for eight years having various sorts of issues until she was sort of mercy-graduated.

Oh, and I'm annoyed at guys again, but that's all you're getting on that front.

All in all, I think I need to come up with an exciting plan for the weekend to take my mind of lab shit....well, that and that I need to have the weekend come really, really soon.

posted by Immunegirl @ 5:10 PM