my life, my pace

Ah, the joys of being the lowest of the low.  Well, technically not quite since undergrads are just a tad lower.  But I’m sure that in the eyes of the all-mighty-far-above-us professors, we’re all the same, undergrad, grad student, ant…there’s really no difference to them.  So is it really surprising that when things don’t go as planned, I get blamed?  I guess not.  But it still sucks.  And I’m still going to complain.

I’ve been trying to schedule some more doomed-to-fail experiments.  Problem is our institution has pesky animal protocols that we have to write and follow and I personally think that I need to update the protocol before we continue because we’re changing things up a bit.  I’ve been in communication with my collaborators about scheduling and in every single email, I’ve asked them to tell me if the protocol is okay.  I even went so far as to volunteer to update it if needed.  But no one addressed my point.  Not even once in five exchanges.  Until I failed to order the animals because I wasn’t sure if I could use the protocol.  Then guess whose fault it was.  Mine, of course.  Well, sorry for following the rules so that you wouldn’t get in trouble.  And of course, if I had gone ahead and ordered the animals and then they later got in trouble, we all know who would have been blamed.  It’s simply a no-win situation for me.

Not only that, but because my major professor is an idiot, he told our collaborators that we were going to do one thing and told me that we were doing another.  Well, I scheduled the another thing with our collaborators and now they think I’m the idiot flip-flopping out of nowhere.

Can you tell that I’m just simply loving grad school here?  Yep.  Every single minute.

Related posts:

1. how to freak a grad student out (tip #251): random qualifying exam committee shuffleAdmit it.  You're always on the lookout for cruel new and unusual ways to freak your grad student out.  It's obviously not enough for you that s/he is already always in full-on freak-out mode for one reason or another anyway.  You just have to make it worse, right?  Well, time to rejoice because I'm now compiling tips on how to freak grad students out from my experiences on the receiving end of such torture.  So let's preface by saying that I'm already super freaked out since I'm supposed to be studying for quals and I haven't been for oh, the last two weeks.  And I keep promising myself that today will be the day that I'll get back into super hardcore studying mode everyday.  So I'm freaked out.So today, I tried really hard to study.  But I was distracted by a number of things, only a few of which actually pertained to grad school.  Just when I was getting ready to hunker down for a long day of studying, an email pops up in my inbox that fills my heart with fear.  Why?  Because its subject was: Qualifying Exam Assignment - mylifemypace.  Oh crap.  They figured out that I should have taken my quals last quarter.  Masochist in me clicked on the email anyway and it took forever to load while my major professor blabbed away about the Mercedes SL500 (seriously, can't you see I'm in the middle of something?).  When it finally loaded, it wasn't what I thought it...
2. and i had such high hopes for this summer…Ah, I remember those days back in June (or was it May?) when I had experiments back to back, week after week.  I really thought that I would finish my experiments by the end of the summer.  But now, the end of summer is almost here and I'm still nowhere near to being done.  Why?  Because my ass of a major professor stopped me from doing anymore experiments because he supposedly is running out of money.  Well, valid enough, I guess.  But it's not my fault he ran out of money when I told him not to do those 10 other pointless experiments in the animal model that didn't work.  Now, he's asking me to start up the experiments again, but the animal protocol expired during my little hiatus and my collaborators aren't responding to my requests to proofread the new one that I've written.  So, here I am, stuck at an impasse.  Yet again.  I really should have just taken an extended vacation.  Since I'm not doing anything useful anyway....
3. how to freak a grad student out (tip #323): ask her to take her qualifying exam earlierHere's another way to freak a grad student out.  And it's almost as cruel as randomly changing one of her qualifying exam committee members.  It's rather simple, really.  Ask her to change the time of her qualifying exam from afternoon to morning so that she can't possibly spend the morning either sleeping because she stayed up really late the night before preparing or doing last minute studying/freaking out.  Not only that, but make sure that you're having her change the time for a completely non-life-threatening reason such as simply because you felt like it.  Even better yet, also make sure to request this change as close to the actual date of the exam as possible so that it'll really catch her by surprise.Yep, that's exactly what the chair of my committee wanted.  And that's what she got.  I was counting on Evil Committee Member to shoot the request down, but she didn't.  So now, I get to fail my quals that much earlier on January 24th.  My husband thinks it's a good thing because I'll be fresh and will get it over with.  But I just think it's going to make things worse than they already are.  I'm so screwed ...

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