Saturday, March 6, 2010


Is it just me or is that flower sticking it's tongue out at me? This time of year it seems like most things are taunting me. I have a little more than a month left before I leave for the field and sometimes I feel like a hunk of taffy, being pulled in opposite directions constantly. Because the field season is looming I want to spend all of my time preparing for the season. However, I can't really prepare if I don't know what the results were from last summer yet. In order to be successful I really need to get some papers published soon, but if I'm spending my time writing I'm not analyzing last year's data. I also need to need to continue presenting the findings I do have, and applying for grants that allow me to continue to fund my research, but can't do those things at the same time I'm analyzing old data or preparing to collect new stuff.
Consequently, being a grad student is similar to being a short-order cook (I can say this with authority since I worked for a couple of years as a cook). You have to multitask constantly, and if you forget about something, it burns, gets cold, is incorrect, or doesn't get made in the first place. So to be successful, you have to keep a lot of balls in the air. As panicky as I am about how soon the field season will begin, in some ways it will be a relief because once it starts all I do is collect data, there is no real time for much else.