Danielle Blog

Getting closer to the top of the mountain

I haven’t said much for the past couple months about how my thesis has been going. Mainly, because I really didn’t want to talk about it.

I am finally ready to post something about it, because I finally feel GOOD about it. I’ll get to that in a second. I’ll back-track a wee bit to put it in perspective.

For review: my thesis will consist of
1. Introduction
2. Chapters – which are in manuscript form – 3 published, 1 unpublished/preliminary (i.e. 4 chapters)
3. Discussion
4. Addendum – a published paper I did for work kind of outside of my main project

When I arrived here in MN, I knew I had 2 manuscripts to write (i.e. 2 chapters), an Intro, and a Discussion to my thesis. I knew that in the past, it has taken me a good solid month to write a single manuscript when I was working in my office at school and dealing with various interruptions and trying to do some experiments. So, I Hoped that I would be able to work much faster without the interruptions.

And I did. I hammered out the body of 2 manuscripts in record time (a couple of weeks – or maybe it was a week and a half), before I headed off to Texas for the Beeeeg Wedding Event. However, there were topics in the discussion of each manuscript that I had not gotten a chance to really read enough about and learn about. I had naively assumed that would take me a couple of days.

WELL, and this is where I got discouraged, it took me a good 2 weeks to find papers, read papers, and figure out how my data did or did not make sense with what had been previously published. The thing is that my work was inadvertently affected by some construction/remodeling that was going on in our building complex. And it ended up creating “stress” on my experiments. So, I had to learn a whole new field – stress – and I had to learn a couple of other fields.

That learning required a LOT of papers, a LOT of notes, and a LOT of frustration.

Here is how bad the area around the couch got right before Thanksgiving.

Warning: Mom, close your eyes, this will bring back memories of my room as a child/preteen and teenager.

There are notes on that picture if you click it.

Even though it may LOOK like a disaster, I actually knew where all of the papers I needed were located.

No really, I DID.

Well, most of the time.

Anyway, I got really frickin frustrated because of some discrepancies in the stress field that just were NOT making sense. And of course the people hadn’t dealt with the discrepancies in their published articles. And it took me most of the Thanskgiving holiday and then a couple more days to figure out what the heck was going on.

Once I figured it out, I moved faster on those manuscripts. However, I was still slowed down by needing to review some work as I went and trying to figure out what should and should not be included. That is really a large part of what our training is all about as Ph.D. students and as post-doctoral fellows…. not only how to design and do experiments, but how to publish them afterward. I think for many of us, the designing and doing and analyzing afterward comes a lot more naturally than the how to talk about it all afterward. There is a fine line between how much detail is too much detail. And as this story goes on and on, I think you can guess which side of the fence I tend to fall on.

(too much detail)

Trying to cut to the chase. I got one of the manuscripts figured out and off to my advisor a few weeks ago. And the second one, a week ago. As of yesterday, I had written the Intro of my thesis. That left The Final Discussion of my thesis. And it felt like a Big Fat Unknown.

I’ve never written a thesis discussion – what the heck did it need to be?

I had this great talk with my advisor yesterday evening. She gave me the general things I needed to cover… and then I got down to the nitty gritty with her. I had outlined what I thought it Could Be. And that prompted us to talk about the nuances of the work. Turns out that a lot of the detail that I put in the manuscript/chapters can go straight into The Final Discussion!

Wait, I think that needs a few more exclamation marks

…. straight into The Final Discussion!!!!!!!!!

This means, in case you haven’t figured it out that
1) The Final Discussion is NO LONGER this big unknown insurmountable THING that I am facing
and
2) I’ve actually found almost all of the detail and WRITTEN almost all of the detail that I need for it!

Can we say BIG sigh of RELIEF!

And now that I am healthy again, all of this looks more do-able, and not so insurmountable.

So, there, that is “how it is going” in regards to my thesis.

And the famous question everyone wants to know – I still don’t know exactly when I will be defending. Probably the end of January. It will partly depend on how fast I can get this final stuff written and how much I can get my advisor to look over stuff between Christmas and New Years.

So, off I go! Back to writing.

Oh, and one other REALLY COOL thing that I just found last night – is that clinicians have stumbled onto some of the same pathways I’m studying and have actually started treating patients with a drug that makes perfect sense for the results we are seeing. How cool is that?!

too cool.