Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Allies, Acceptance and Automation

I've found myself an ally in trying to get my advisor to give me feedback. One of my professors for coursework is an older guy, about to retire, and noticed I was rather upset the other day. We sat down and talked about my situation, and he gave me good advice about how to approach my advisor about the problem, how to escalate if nothing gets better, and has offered to confront my advisor independently but indirectly.

I'm also accepting that I will only get regular feedback around impending external deadlines, and so submitting conference abstracts may be the best way to get feedback on my data, even if it may not get the publication read. There's always the other people at conferences who ask handy questions like "when is the paper coming out"?

Automating code is the best thing ever: I've streamlined one of my analysis codes significantly to skip all of the copy-paste steps it included during development. Running analysis in batches is fantastic!

Sunnier weather has definitely improved my mood. That, and Friday night karaoke at the local independent bookstore.

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