I would be remiss if I didn’t post soon again after that last dismal entry.
Things are looking up, or at least, aren’t looking as down as they were. Data analysis is clipping along at the lab, and my advisor is excited about our project. It’s been a while since we were working on my data and making any headway, so it was nice to reconvene and see our good work. It always gets my advisor fired up, and that gets me encouraged.
I also had a semi-candid conversation with aforementioned advisor about how behind I was feeling on my work and how much there seems to be to do this upcoming year. I’m certainly behind where I need to be, so I don’t think I’ll be quite on track, but it sounds like it’s not a disaster. He is completely nonplussed and said that the metrics they’re giving us to follow were mostly to ‘weed out the chaff’. So if I’m still excited about my work, and it’s going well, but late… well, I guess it’ll be okay. The only really positive take-home message I got from the whole conversation was that my advisor made this little smirking face to himself while I was explaining why I thought I wasn’t doing a good job. It was a face that said I’m a naive graduate student who is needlessly worried and doing a good job. Like he remembered being this pent up about deadlines and those days are far behind him (and lo, they are quite far behind him…) and some day I’ll learn that doing good work speaks for itself. It’s not really enough to sustain me through dark days, but it’s better than nothing. I can at least be confident that while on paper my deadlines look firm and the repercussions for dallying feel dire, my advisor could care less and thinks I’m on track.
In related good news, the project really is going well. I’ve hired Lewis to help me build a model for data analysis, and we’re getting help from a variety of fronts. My advisor is an excellent networker, and he has been talking up my project to a rather famous psycholinguist who has been looking into similar questions with similar methods for analysis and has just published a paper much more like mine than any other I’ve seen so far. He was kind enough to basically loan us the postdoc who built his model, and that postdoc is willing to either mod their model for us, or give us their model to mess with as we see fit. It effectively adds an author to the paper I should be able to publish out of this, and it’s a massive help for our burgeoning pattern classification program too. I’ve also gotten my hands on the book that fully describes the other stats model we’re using, which means I can finally try and understand the transforms we’re doing on our data to get the groupwise stats. Even better, those alternate groupwise stats are nearly done, and in doing so we may have finally figured out how to batch script the program I have to use, which means the next few rounds of manipulations should go much more quickly. So… things grind forward. Slowly, but with distinct momentum.
All is not lost.