There are six people on my grant in addition to me acting as advisers. That's not even including the PhD program adviser who wanted to put his 2 cents in as well. Having a lot of advisers is quite helpful, especially when they confine their advice to their area of expertise. It's when they stray from that area that the advice can get a little.... conflicting.
Here are some of the comments I have received.
"You have too few citations. It makes it look like you don't have good command of the literature."
"You have too many citations. It makes it look like you don't have good command of the literature."
"Use this specific phrasing to describe the model you're going to use. You need to say that you will use a nonlinear model that will be chosen dependent on the distribution of the data."
"What does this even mean? What do you mean you're going to look at the distribution of the data before deciding on your model."
"You should never use bullets."
"I love bullets to set off pieces of text that are important."
"I love text boxes to make the document more readable."
"What is this text box doing here? Text boxes are stupid."
"You should abbreviate acute respiratory failure as ARF. It will save space."
"ARF sounds like barf. Don't use it."
"ARF stands for acute renal failure*. Don't use it."
"I have no idea how you're going to fit everything into this grant."
"You should add more about your training plan."
You get the idea. The trick is using the most useful of everyone's advice to make the grant better (because though I bitch and moan, it is for the most part useful advice), yet weeding out the advice that doesn't work in a way that doesn't piss my adviser off when they read the next draft.
Le sigh. In a week and a half it will be over. Yip yip yipeeeee!!
*For the record, dear non-clinician, it's called acute kidney injury now (AKI). Touche.
10 Pearls of Wisdom:
>>For the record, dear non-clinician, it's called acute kidney injury now (AKI). Touche.>>
That must be a very recent change. First Ehrlichia became Anaplasma, now this... guess I've officially been in practice for "a while".
It's been at least two years. They were using AKI during our Renal block 2nd year.
"ARF sounds like something Boo would say. That's cute. I'd use it."
ARF made me think of acute renal failure. This is the first I'd heard of AKI as well, but I've been away from Internal Medicine for a bit. Looks like they changed the name in 2004/2005. I guess future generations won't confuse respiratory failure with kidney problems. I used to love going through the pre / intra / post renal differential. Well - love might be too strong a word.
I remember thinking when I was TOLD to use ARF by my mentor that people would say it was confusing because they'd think of acute renal failure. But he's a pulmonologist. Maybe kidneys aren't even on his radar?
>>It's been at least two years. They were using AKI during our Renal block 2nd year.>>
The last time I did a literature search on ARF now AKI was probably 2007. It's an uncommon problem in horses so I tend to search the human literature as well.
Sounds like being a contestant on American Idol.
TM -- Yes! I hadn't thought of that. But definitely true. Haha.
Hi OMDG,
This is E.G. from the post-bac pre-med MiM post.
I wanted to warn you, I'm following your blog! Also, I wanted to ask you one more thing -- how did you get experience as a researcher before your MD-PhD program?
EG -- How did I get into research? The full story is a bit long, but maybe I'll post about it sometime this week.
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