Or perhaps not, but I’ve been listening to too much JoCo lately and really love that line.

Dear Blog,

I know it’s been like eight and a half years since I last wrote. I’m sorry. I’ve been staring at a blank New Post screen for the past several days, unsure how to compose my thoughts and then translate them into typing. I should worry about that less, I suppose, but I don’t want people who read this to thing I’m a complete idiot. I know in my head that I write this blog mostly for me but I also recognize that some friends and family (and a few random strangers) read it.

Let’s start this much-belated entry with my committee meeting on Monday. My hellaciously-frustrating and soul-sapping committee meeting. For those of you not familiar with the process, I have an advisory committee composed of my PI and four other professors who are supposed to help guide my progress towards my PhD. I’m supposed to meet with them twice a year. This meeting was a little late — my last meeting was in March — but the one before that was in December, so I’m on track on average. One of the professors couldn’t make the meeting time but that was not really a problem…the other three (not including my PI) are who I look towards for the most guidance and approval.

I prepared about 35 slides detailing what I wanted to do to finish my degree and the rationale behind the experiments. A lot of them were “structural” slides and I figured going through them all would take about 30 minutes, which is a just a hair long but not horrible. We were there for just over two hours. The first hour actually went pretty well. I talked about the background and previous work from the lab and think I answered all of the committee’s questions well. I probably *should* have know the answer to one or two more of them than I did, but I think I acquitted myself reasonably well. The second hour was another story, especially the last half hour.

I knew going in to the meeting that I didn’t have a ton of data to share and that they’d be upset with my lack of forward movement. I knew that and was ready for that. What I didn’t fully expect — and perhaps I should have — was my boss playing spin doctor as much as he did. Maybe that’s not quite what he did, but I’m not sure how to describe it any better.

About two months ago we had a lab meeting where I stood up in front of a blackboard and we came up with every possible experiment I could be doing to finish my project. Feasible, unfeasible, realistic, unrealistic, everything. Afterwards my PI said to pick three to do to finish my degree. I’m not as foolish as I may come across, so I picked the three that would allow me to finish as quickly as possible. The story might not be fantastic but it would be enough to build a thesis and get at least one first-author publication. When I presented this to the boss he noted that I had picked the easiest and least time-consuming experiments and said that I needed to think about “pizazz” and “career management.” I might have a thesis at the end of that work, but who would want to hear the job talk? If I wanted to get a good postdoc position I would need to do something a little more flashy. I went back to the list and picked up a set of experiments involving immunofluorescence and FISH which would address some of the more speculative parts of our working model. Not experiments I particularly wanted to do but they would be showy and give me some really great pictures to use at the end of my job talk. I was told to present these as experiments to do “as time permits.”

My committee was less than thrilled about this idea. They said that what I needed to do was to focus on getting enough data to write a thesis and get at least one first-author paper, not start a new, speculative series of experiments that feel — to me, at least — like a fishing expedition. Tom’s response? “That’s what I’ve been telling him for the last two months!” When I brought up his denigration of my plan to just do the experiments I needed to graduate and his insistence of adding pizazz he claimed that he had told me all along that my original plan was fine with him. I…I just don’t know what to say at this point.

Crap. I need to go proctor an exam and I know if I don’t post this now I won’t go back and finish it. More later, I promise.