Dear Self,

Don’t forget that you’re trying to post an entry every day for a month. I know you were busy yesterday, so I’ll let it slide, but let’s not let that happen again, okay? Cool.

Love you, man.

You/me/us.

As I’ve mentioned to some of you, yesterday was the second Big Meeting between me, my boss, the department chair, and the associate dept chair/member of my committee. And like the first meeting, yours truly got beaten around pretty badly. This time they were all upset with me because I hadn’t finished writing up a list of specific aims to finish my studies in this lab. This was something that I knew I had to work on, but somehow I missed that this past meeting was the deadline to have it done. I wrote a draft which I sent to the associate chair/committee member but hadn’t heard back from him, so I figured that this was an ongoing project. Had I realized that I was going to get yelled at for half an hour, I would have pressed him harder for his revisions, especially after I saw him last week and he said something like, “I got your draft and need to get my comments back to you.”

Now I have another Big Meeting next Wednesday. I wrote a draft of the specific aims in precisely the format that they asked for last night (another one of my problems…I didn’t realize that they wanted it formatted as in a grant proposal, which is apparently the way a list of specific experiments is supposed to be organized) and sent it out. I’m supposed to meet with Tom today to go over it but have yet to hear anything. Of course, it’s only 10.

Here’s the thing that’s really bothering me, and I can’t decide whether I’m being overly whiny or not. I feel like Tom is the person who has screwed up and I’m the one being punished for it. I’m at the end of my fifth year of grad school. Our departmental graduation average is 5 and a half years, so even if I finish this summer I’d be ahead of average. In this lab, nobody finishes in five years. As far as I know, every former student has taken at least six years to finish his or her degree, and some have taken longer. So how is it fair or reasonable to threaten to cut off my funding because Tom has failed at his job?

I haven’t actually said any of this to Tom or the other people at the Big Meeting and I can’t decide whether I should or not. I understand the realities of the fiscal situation. It’s a difficult time to get funded right now and I realize that it costs money to support me, both in terms of my salary and the reagents I need to actually do the experiments. However, my job as a graduate student is to learn how to do the experiments and to perform the research while the job of my mentor (and I use that term loosely) is to advise, teach, and find the funding to support his lab.

Enough ranting. Time to do some bench work, although that apparently doesn’t matter until I have a “road map” in place. It apparently doesn’t matter if I can actually do the experiments, so long as I have a plan to do them, or at least that’s the lesson I’ve learned in the last 24 hours. Grumble, grumble…