The devil is in the details

Don't be a statistic(ian)!

When last I left you (well, not including the hangover post) I was basking in the glow of praise from my boss over my scientific prowess (because obviously I called the monkeys and told them what their cell counts should be to make the statistics come out right).
My new thought:
Statistics suck.

I spent ALL DAY Friday working on the analysis and figures for the paper, while getting hourly visits from the boss where he would ask about my progress. I didn't finish on Friday (before going to the bar) and ended up leaving a bunch of figures to be made over the weekend. I even turned down a day trip to go shopping so that I could get work done (and I'll admit, recover from the hangover). It was largely a working weekend.

Then, I was the lucky winner of spending ALL DAY yesterday doing analysis and making figures. The boss was again visiting my desk at least hourly to ask about figures, and he was writing the paper as fast as I could assemble the data, so he was also bringing by figure legends and text for me to look over and help out with. He seemed to be increasingly losing his mind over the whole thing as well. He kept coming up with new and outlandish analyses for me to do, making it less and less likely that I would finish the work that day. At least he was also profusely apologizing, to which I replied "Just as long as you don't yell at me come Wednesday for not having done any experiments since the last grad student meeting, I'll be fine."

I was able to calm down sufficiently well last night (see subsequent post) and then went in for another fun day of stats today. I didn't think that I had too much left to do, so I was hoping to get some real work done this afternoon. Ha!!! I spent yet another entire day doing analysis and on the phone with a biostatistician that we collaborate with. In the end (aka after my final boss conversation of the day) we decided to move some of the analysis down a different path. He asked me to crunch some new numbers and think about some of the issues tonight (which you can see I'm doing a great job with). Ugggggh. Such a pain.

Edited to add: To those of you who are grad students in my lab: a heads up....we are talking about this stuff at grad student meeting tomorrow.

posted by Immunegirl @ 7:49 PM