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Swimming out of the doldrums
Jun. 14th, 2013 04:24 pmI had a great meeting with my postdoc advisor today. It has been challenging, trying to simultaneously push five projects forward, but I *am* making progress. One piece at a time.
One project (the Manuscript of Doom II: The Sequel) was accepted with revisions on Wednesday. I haven't started looking through the reviewers' comments yet, but the associate editor's comments lead me to think the reviewers have provided us with useful references to chase down and read. That's been a huge issue with the MOD, because we have to discuss an entire field (game theory, basically) that we have little theoretical background in because we are behavioral biologists who spend more time dealing with empirical data. Also, most of what's written in that field is irrelevant, but it takes some careful work to show/convince others that it's irrelevant.
Meanwhile, I've been postponing revisions on Diss Chap 1 because I've been slogging through data analysis for that cricket feeding project I wrote about previously. The cricket feeding project is slightly more complicated than I often make it sound, and really consists of three separate experiments. So far, for the past month and a half or so, I've been working mostly on papers for the other two experiments, and have gotten them both to the point where they're rough outlines for papers. Today, we covered the analyses for the remaining experiment and roughed it out into the semblance of a paper.
One of the things I want to note for my own sake is my advisor's method for handling this phase of data analysis. First, he's a good, careful statistician and scientist - qualities I wish to emulate. So we spend time discussing what different findings mean. It also means he loves to scrutinize the work I've done and is great about catching or thinking about things I may have missed. Much nicer to catch many such things at home than have a reviewer catch them all later and declare our work half-baked. Beyond that, though, he likes to ask the question, "So, if you had to fit this into a series of figures for a paper, what would each figure contain?" That forces me to track down key points, helping me escape from the data forest I've been lurking in.
In the long run, I could probably get myself to work through this whole process independently, but there are two good reasons not to. The first is that this project needs to be a collaboration, so my advisor needs to have involvement in decision-making throughout the course of the project. He doesn't actually want to be handed a fully-developed copy of a paper without having seen previous versions of it (if that happened, can you imagine what would happen next if he disagreed with it?). The second is that we can get all of this work done more quickly by playing off of each others' strengths. Meeting to discuss data gives me focus and motivation to dive back into the data in a productive fashion, and in our conversations we can work out key ideas.
And all of this is why, in How to Write a Lot, Paul Silvia encourages first-time book writers to write with a coauthor.
Also, I brought in cake and am working on getting a lab birthday celebration system going. I've decided this kind of thing is too important to let slide.
One project (the Manuscript of Doom II: The Sequel) was accepted with revisions on Wednesday. I haven't started looking through the reviewers' comments yet, but the associate editor's comments lead me to think the reviewers have provided us with useful references to chase down and read. That's been a huge issue with the MOD, because we have to discuss an entire field (game theory, basically) that we have little theoretical background in because we are behavioral biologists who spend more time dealing with empirical data. Also, most of what's written in that field is irrelevant, but it takes some careful work to show/convince others that it's irrelevant.
Meanwhile, I've been postponing revisions on Diss Chap 1 because I've been slogging through data analysis for that cricket feeding project I wrote about previously. The cricket feeding project is slightly more complicated than I often make it sound, and really consists of three separate experiments. So far, for the past month and a half or so, I've been working mostly on papers for the other two experiments, and have gotten them both to the point where they're rough outlines for papers. Today, we covered the analyses for the remaining experiment and roughed it out into the semblance of a paper.
One of the things I want to note for my own sake is my advisor's method for handling this phase of data analysis. First, he's a good, careful statistician and scientist - qualities I wish to emulate. So we spend time discussing what different findings mean. It also means he loves to scrutinize the work I've done and is great about catching or thinking about things I may have missed. Much nicer to catch many such things at home than have a reviewer catch them all later and declare our work half-baked. Beyond that, though, he likes to ask the question, "So, if you had to fit this into a series of figures for a paper, what would each figure contain?" That forces me to track down key points, helping me escape from the data forest I've been lurking in.
In the long run, I could probably get myself to work through this whole process independently, but there are two good reasons not to. The first is that this project needs to be a collaboration, so my advisor needs to have involvement in decision-making throughout the course of the project. He doesn't actually want to be handed a fully-developed copy of a paper without having seen previous versions of it (if that happened, can you imagine what would happen next if he disagreed with it?). The second is that we can get all of this work done more quickly by playing off of each others' strengths. Meeting to discuss data gives me focus and motivation to dive back into the data in a productive fashion, and in our conversations we can work out key ideas.
And all of this is why, in How to Write a Lot, Paul Silvia encourages first-time book writers to write with a coauthor.
Also, I brought in cake and am working on getting a lab birthday celebration system going. I've decided this kind of thing is too important to let slide.
