preparations for AGU winding to a close

I have always been one of those people who prefers to complete tasks well before their deadlines. Alas, recent events have been teaching me to push deadlines harder than I would like. I fly out Friday morning for AGU, and have only just completed my first draft of my poster to be presented. Fortunately, my poster session isn’t until Thursday, so I can print my poster after I arrive, so it isn’t a problem that it isn’t yet in its final, complete form, but I am a tad bit uncomfortable with the fact that it isn’t perfect yet.

So, what factors conspire to make it take longer than I would like? There are several; learning to use Mathmatica, which program, while very powerful, is also very fussy about the format of the data one presents it, having had time to run only three experiments thus far, and, as I’ve mentioned in prior posts, having some of them run water-undersaturated, resulting in very small grain sizes, making it difficult to obtain good analyses with the microprobe, and taking a couple of days off last week to fly to Stockholm for a symposium on Medieval music and dancing in the way of a pre-birthday celebration. (Note: when I purchased the tickets for that adventure I didn’t know yet if I’d be able to attend AGU or not.) Now that I’ve (finally) got my data into the correct format and graphs have been produced I am feeling much better about my prospects of completing everything on time. However, I am highly amused at the fact that I’d long since decided to print my poster after I reach California, in part so that I wouldn’t have to carry a poster-tube with me in these days of severe luggage restrictions, and just now I received a phone call from a colleague who asks if I would be willing to transport his poster to the meeting for him. So much for that reason to delay. However, I still have another fine reason: so that I can speak with the printer in English about what I want done, rather than trying to use the local language to place the order. (Never mind that I successfully printed a poster for the conference in Edinburgh back in July even though the clerk at the print shop spoke no English whatsoever.)

There will always be just one more sample you will want to analyze, no matter how close the deadline. When this happens, just say no.

Once upon a time, before I started my PhD project, my advisor did some analysis of the mineral monazite in various samples from across Tasmania, to determine the age of the grains. When I started my project some time there after I was unable to obtain training on the use of our microprobe the first year I was here, because our microprobe operator had been hired away to Edinburgh, and it took a while to find a suitable replacement and get him the appropriate visas to start work. So, to keep me out of trouble, in addition to looking at 100+ thin sections of the various Tasmanian rocks that had been collected by previous UTAS students and faculty over the years, to determine which ones would be good candidates for detailed petrological analysis, he also put me to work writing a paper summarizing the results of the monazite dating he’d done before I arrived. For most of the samples I wrote the sample description myself, since I had the thin sections in my office. However, one of them, which had been collected in 1962 from an area which is now under a dam, wasn’t in my office, and my advisor couldn’t find it in his office. Undaunted, I searched the 1962 thesis (which didn’t have a table of contents—so I created one for it) and found the original sample description, and adapted that information for our paper.

Years elapsed. UTAS hired a new microprobe operator. I learned to use the microprobe. I engaged in my own analytical work, both my own monazite dating of other Tasmanian samples, and analysis of other minerals to do calculations as to what temperatures and pressures these minerals must have grown. Eventually, I slowed down on my data acquisition and commenced writing up my results. During this process, I noticed a familiar sample number occurring in the list of “standards” being used for each and every session of monazite dating. Yes, that missing sample from the paper has been living in the microprobe lab all this time. It gives remarkably consistent results. It has had more than 170 different analyses (some samples have had 15), and they all give more or less the same age, and have pretty much the same composition. Indeed, the graphs for its monazite composition show considerably less variation than those for the other samples.

Today it occurred to me that I should look at the sample, to see if I can relate the pattern of its composition to any other details in the sample, so I went and borrowed it from the microprobe lab. Now that I’ve seen it, I so wish I’d have seen it years ago. It is full of lovely albite porphyroblasts with inclusion trails at an angle to the foliation of the matrix minerals. There are tiny garnet grains, and biotite is present. In short, all of the minerals needed to do the pressure/temperature calculations, plus plenty of structural details visible in the sample to make for an interesting story. And here I am, with only three weeks to get my thesis finish, printed, bound, and submitted. There is just no way that I am going to be able to analyze this sample and do the calculations, since I am out of time and budget with which to do it, which is a pity, because it looks as though it would have been a lovely addition to the story.

chasing mirages

My life lately has been alternating between making progress on my thesis, or and enjoying a more active social life than had been normal just a few months ago. I have a partner who recently completed his degree and, as a result, has come out of his self-imposed near-exile state that he maintained while he was still studying. From a life which involved uni work, computer games, and a reflexive “no” to any suggestions of social outings he is now suggesting social outings on a regular basis, and playing far, far fewer computer games than had been his norm. Now I’m the one who winds up staying home to work on my thesis while he goes out and spends time with our friends. Some days this is very effective and I accomplish enough to be happy I did. Other days I wish I had gone, and don’t manage to accomplish as much as I would have liked, and still other days I go along, enjoy myself, and accept that I’ve just added that much more time to the target completion date.
Ah, the target completion-date. Pretty much everyone I know asks me “when will you be finished?” How I wish I knew! Some days it feels like I’m chasing a mirage—I think about what has to be done to complete a chapter or a section; list them out A, B, and C tasks yet to be done and I can move on to the next part. But then, once I’ve done task A I discover that I also need to do D before that section will be complete, and once I’ve done B I find that E and F need to be added to the list. It is only when I stop and look at what has been done I feel like I’ve made any progress—the pile behind me is growing, but so is the pile yet to be done.
In some ways I’m not concerned and feel like I’ve plenty of time available. I’ve received a sufficient number of “sorry, we aren’t hiring after all due to budget cuts” and “sorry, we had so many truly qualified applicants that it was difficult to make a decision, but we’ve hired someone else” letters that I am pretty certain that I don’t need to stress about finishing on time to have the degree complete so that I can start a job in a teaching position in the northern hemisphere fall semester this year—sure there are a few universities which haven’t yet gotten back to me, but since they haven’t asked for a phone interview yet, I’m not holding my breath on them. This gives me extra time to complete my degree and get papers written for publication before next year’s round of academic hiring, with no stress about being “on time” and that is a good thing.
However, there are still post-doc positions, which seem to be advertised at random intervals. I just saw one today for a position in Europe which sounds like it could be fun. Alas, they want someone by 1 June—if I apply for this one, it would be back to the “hurry up—how fast can you finish?” approach. Ah the joys of a scholar’s life—shall I take my time and work in a low-stress environment and miss out on potential opportunities in the short term, or hurry up so that I can chase every interesting opportunity which comes along and hope that the haste doesn’t cause me to do a poor job?

Is it done yet?

Different people have different approaches to deadlines. Heck, many of us have multiple approaches to our own deadlines, depending upon what they are, who imposed them, and how crucial we see them to be at the moment. The two main approaches I tend to take with deadlines are been 1) turn it in before the deadline arrives or 2) undertake deadline-free projects.

As an undergraduate student I would usually start projects and assignments as soon as they were assigned, I always managed to turn in the assignment on the day it was due, and in the case of essays, I tended to have them “complete” with a few days to spare, so that I would have time to edit them before turning them in. In my historical recreation life I prefer the deadline-free approach. I am very fond of creating hand-sewn costumes which require much time to complete. Many of my friends, on the other hand, decide that they want a new costume for a specific upcoming event, and then spend many late hours the night before (or, often, every night for a week before) said event finishing up the costume “enough” to wear at the event. Not me, I prefer to approach my sewing with the attitude of “I need a project to work on at medieval reenactment events”. I then focus upon the process, taking care that my stitching is of the best quality, and enjoying the work for the peaceful relaxation which stems from doing the task, combined with enjoying the company of my friends while I stitch.

My approach to my PhD project has been a bit of a hybrid of the two attitudes. On the one hand, I am/have been putting in many hours of work, starting tasks as soon as possible after I am aware that they need doing. I always stop whatever else I have been working on to process the data straight away when I receive my microprobe results. I also continue to react to some sub-deadlines with my undergraduate approach. Each year I’d schedule my annual review meeting the first time they sent out the reminder that it was coming due, and would have mine done, turned in, and approval back from the University while the department was still sending out e-mails saying “some of you haven’t yet scheduled your annual reviews and need to do so soon”. When working on a paper in collaboration with others I generally sent back my edits/comments with 48 hours of receiving it from them.

However, there are other deadlines associated with a PhD project. These are the ones we set ourselves. In the annual review we are required to list our goals for what we will accomplish in the next year, and set dates by which these tasks will be accomplished. Each time I set these dates in consultation with my advisor, and each time, the tasks took longer than the amount of time set. I am now well past the first date associated with the task “submit thesis”, and only a week from the most recent date attached to that task, and still it is not ready to submit. The side of me which feels that deadlines exist so that we can have things done a week to three days before the deadline is somewhat twitchy about the relationship between the calendar and the various “submit thesis” deadlines I have failed to meet. On the other hand, the part of me which cares more about doing a task well, and because it is worth doing, and not because of deadlines, is happily puttering along, enjoying what I’m learning, content in the progress I’ve made. Which should I listen to? The stressed out “you are late” voice in my ear, or the “this is interesting, and wait, you haven’t looked at the data *this* way yet…” voice in the other ear?

I commented to my advisor yesterday that working on a PhD project seems to be a lesson in how not to meet deadlines, no matter how punctual one has been hitherto. He replied that in a three week project, if one gets 10% behind schedule, one can give up one day of the weekend, put in a long day, and catch up, but on a three year project if one gets 10% behind one day of hard work will not be enough to catch back up. Am I behind? It has been 3.6 years since I started this project. The Australian University system says that three years is how long a PhD project “should” take, and that if you ask nicely and show that the delays are due to circumstances beyond your control they will fund you for 3.5 years. So, the question really is, do I believe them? Is that really an appropriate amount of time to make the transition from “knowing little to nothing about metamorphic petrology” to “doctor of philosophy and expert of this tiny sub-set of metamorphic petrology as applied to this tiny portion of the planet”? Perhaps it is. Perhaps they are unrealistic in their time limits. Or, perhaps, they deliberately set impossible deadlines because they have found that in the old days, when PhD projects were meant to take four years, people took seven to ten, but now that they say we may have only three years, people tend to take about four.