Month-and-a-half o' Hell...

Sorry everyone, but work circumstances required me to take a one-and-a-half month hiatus from the blog-o-sphere (not only did I not update my own blog, but I admit that I haven't read anyone else's either...). Here's a quick summary of the last month:

1) I finished writing a draft of the introduction to my Ph.D. thesis. It's about 70 pages of text (not counting the large number of references) and I may have to trim it down a bit. Writing this thing also required me to read somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred-plus new papers, which probably explains why my extra-curricular reading has pretty much stopped.

2) I spent a lot of time helping the undergraduate student I was supervising finish her honor's project/thesis. Her work was fairly complex, involving RT-qPCR, and all things considered, I think that she did a pretty good job with it. No offense to my undergraduate readers, but it's a rare undergraduate who doesn't end up being a HoDaD (Hands of Doom and Destruction) or alternatively a 'Wondergrad'¹. Thankfully, our lab has had some excellent undergrad students.

3) I put together a brief proposal / oral presentation for a review paper that my supervisor and I are going to begin working on shortly. It's going to be presented at a conference at the end of May, so I've gotta put quite a bit of work into this between now and then.

4) I've been working on analyzing the data generated by my 'main' Ph.D. project. I had to submit an abstract to the SMBE a few weeks ago, and I've gotta start writing a draft paper/chapter for my thesis on this work ASAP if I plan to defend in July. I've also gotta get a bunch more work done on it before the committee meeting that I've gotta have really soon.

5) Finally, I've been asked to make a few more revisions on the manuscript that was recently conditionally accepted. The reviewer's second round of criticisms aren't as extensive as the first round was. However, given everything else I've had to do, any more work is a bit daunting.

Thus I haven't been sleeping very well and over the past few days I've been pretty sick with a cold. Despite this, I feel a strange lack of stress. Obviously I've got a ton of work to do and stuff, but at least it's all lying there on the table: my goals are clear, so all I have to do is meet them.

I suppose my month hasn't been all 'hell'. I was able to finish Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True, which was pretty damned excellent (if all goes as planned I should get a chance to meet him personally in June, and I'm hoping he'll sign my book!). I'm also done reading Coyne and Orr's Speciation, which is among the best full-length technical monographs I've read. I certainly recommend it to any evolutionary biologists out there.

Anyways, I suppose that I can summarize the past six weeks simply by saying that the constant need to meet deadlines (apply for scholarships, travel awards, conference talks, thesis details, committee meeting, etc.) threw a giant wrench into my normal routine. Thus whenever I felt that I had any time to blog, I immediately figured that my time could be much better spent a) working, or b) spending time with the gf. I'm still insanely busy (I have a final supervisory committee meeting scheduled for Wednesday, for example); however, I think I have all of my summer conference travel plans and thesis details worked out, so I expect that I can begin participating in the blog-o-sphere again.


¹Please... if you're an undergrad doing your first research project, ask questions, write things down, and try to be careful. Trust me, if you ever go to grad school, the term 'Wondergrad' will suddenly make a lot of sense to you.