Will I ever graduate?
Well, I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog front lately, chiefly because I’ve been busy with work and preparing and giving a bunch of talks. They all went reasonably well, but unfortunately work itself has taken rather an unfortunate turn. I recently discovered that my efficiency for reconstructing my signal events is only about half as good as we had thought it was and is lower than the previous analysis. This is not good since I was counting on having higher statistics than the previous analysis to make up for the fact that I will have larger backgrounds. However, if I have lower statistics and higher backgrounds, one might well ask why this analysis is really worth doing. And the answer would probably be no.
So right now I’m trying to determine the answer to that question and to see if there’s any way to get my efficiency up to a reasonable level but at the moment things are not looking good. The upshot of all this is that if I can’t figure out a way to fix this, I may end up having to change projects. This would be bad. Things were already looking like it might not be until sometime next fall before I was able to defend my thesis, but with this it might well not be until next Christmas or spring (meaning 2008) before I’d be done. All in all, not exactly terribly encouraging. So I’m sort of back to looking at feasibility again, which I thought I’d solved a long time ago (and discovered that it was very possible) and for now it’s not looking terribly hopeful.
This rather messes up the plan of moving to Baltimore next summer, obviously, which would be very frustrating, but for now I’m sort of trying to just focus on the task at hand and I will worry about the longer term consequences as they become relevant, so to speak.
: (
I hope that everything turns around, and RAINBOWS actually FLY out of your data! But if not if that sort of thing would mess up your data…
That sucks, man.
I hope this turns out to be a crisitunity and you find an awesome solution that proves exactly how brilliant you are.
If not… I find it’s actually better to confront worries head on. Seriously sit down and work out what the absolute worst case scenario for you.
Maybe you leave graduate school, become destitute, and end up living in a refrigerator box muttering about conservation of energy while you shake a tin cup containing fifty-three cents at passers-by. I’m guessing the actual situation would not that bad.
I managed to get through about sixty panic attacks in grad school by realizing that the absolute worst thing that could possibly happen to me was really just getting a job teaching physics at a community college or a high school somewhere. It would have been very, very deeply disappointing if that were to happen, but not the end of the world.
Then I had to make the connection that this is the fate I was AFRAID of. Fail at grad school => community college job. As I contemplated whatever was fucked about my thesis at that moment, was it rational to be shaking from head to toe, heart pounding and palms sweating because I might end up (horrors!) teaching physics at a 2-year college?
NO! It’s reasonable to experience that level of anxiety if failure to complete my thesis would result in me being dropped in the middle of an African game preserve armed with nothing but a spork. But that’s not the case! Life will go on!
Neil Fiore calls this doing “the work of worrying.” First figure out the worst thing that can happen. Accept that it’s really not all that bad. If you can internalize that, you will be cool-headed enough to take the next step, of deciding what actions you need to take to avoid the fate that you fear.
Yikes!
Sorry to hear that, Dan.