This morning, I received an email from my mentor. He FINALLY conceded that we weren't going to be able to finish the paper until after the 3/1 call for papers deadline. And while on one hand it sort of sucks that I will have to keep working on this godforsaken thing for another week or so (hopefully only), AT LEAST I can study for my exams this week unfettered.
I don't feel the least bit bad about it either.
He gave me 5 additional complicated analyses to complete. And you know, they are all really valid, interesting analyses that will add a lot to the manuscript. There's a reason he's as good as he is. But they are time consuming. Too time consuming to be completed before Tuesday at any rate.
Of course one of these involves changing one of my outcome variables. While I understand the rationale for the change, this underscores the importance of actually MEETING with your PI to talk about your work during the process of producing it. And we haven't met in oh.... a month (of course, this is probably why we're getting along better.... but I digress) due to him being away/on service all this time -- totally not his fault. Of course, who's to say that this change wouldn't have occurred to him at the last minute anyway, so I'm not really grousing about this too much.
The main reason we're not going to be able to submit Tuesday however, is that one of these analyses is a multilevel hierarchical model x3 (and perhaps x9) models. On the dataset we're using, this will take, oh, about 3 days to run. Per model. I can run 3 models at once, but still, we're talking a minimum of 3 days for the first set of models alone.
And I have to say, while it's irritating that I now have to run these time consuming models, it's incredibly awesome that I effectively CAN'T use my computer to conduct any more analyses during this time. This essentially gives me protected time to study (which I should be doing now instead of writing this blog post).
So while on one hand -- We can't submit today, and I'll still have this damn thing hanging over my head, darn. On the other hand -- Now I have the chance to take my time on it (a little) and really do a good job. And also have time to study so that I can pass my exams.
Because of all this, I had the time to do my weekly swim after class today as well.
So, Yay!
Today is a good day.
3 Pearls of Wisdom:
Don't you love it when things line up?
Yes, it amazes me to see med students keep-up an active blog as you do here.
Before, I would line up my priorities and my time was theirs. Now I realize I've been missing out on fun things, like blogging.
It's all about the balancing act, isn't it?
Once you get the hang of it, a post only really takes 15 min or so. Plus it's therapeutic, and I save time by not whining to my husband later.
I've got to learn to cut down my writing to that much.
And glad to hear you have some honest to goodness time to study.
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