Why Graduate School Was the Worst Decision Ever

I've worked 56 hours in the past 4 days alone (Weds-Sat...well, now Sun am). Probably for nothing.

That ridiculous talk situation? It got even more ridiculous, but I'll spare you the details and just say that I finally got "official" notice Friday that I am indeed presenting. I'd been thinking all along that this presentation is next Friday afternoon. Wrong. I realized Friday evening that it's actually Thursday.

The whole "go for broke" idea and lack of currently working instruments means I've been running mostly overnight to get as much instrument time as possible. This wouldn't be so bad if I didn't also have stuff to do during the day. I'd actually been considering trying to switch over "night shift," in order to get as much instrument time as I wanted, but hadn't due to all the daytime meetings and such, ignoring the fact that I'm so not a night owl, and think 10 pm is a perfectly reasonable time to go to bed on a regular basis.

I went into lab when it was dark out, came out to discover it was light out.

I ate breakfast in my office (well, in the lab...shhh). From stuff I had in my office. We're not talking about a day where I had to be at school early, and grabbed breakfast on my way in. We're talking worked all night, was hungry at 5:30 am, went into office, found oatmeal and tea in a drawer and called it breakfast.

Unfortunately a lot more has to go into this than collecting an enormous amount of data for one week. The data has to be analyzed, literature searched, figures made, calculations done, presentation assembled. I can do stuff like lit searches and outline/gather/make the trivial stuff for the actual presentation while collecting data. Between the nature of the data, what I need to do with it, and the way my brain processes this data, I can't really get much analysis done while collecting more data. The best I can really do is quick checks here and there to try to catch problems and decide the next best step on the fly.

I have a bad habit of blogging (and pursuing other internet-driven-time-sucks) more just when I have less time to do so. We're going to call it mental health preservation. If it makes it sound like a slightly less terrible waste of my time, I have had a spectrum acquiring the entire time I've been writing this.

The better experiments are going, the harder it is to leave. Which is the trap I'm currently stuck in. I'm really hoping that my labmate who signed up for the instrument today shows up a whole lot earlier than I think he's likely to.

At this point you must think I've completely lost my mind, and maybe I have. Any normal person probably would have said f@&# that days ago. (Normal people are smarter than people who go to graduate school.) The seminar announcement has already gone out to the entire department, so there's definitely no backing out of presenting. I'd really like to win this stupid thing, especially because part of me feels like I got jipped last year. And I'd really, really like that prize money. There are plane tickets to be bought and student loans to pay down. Even though at this point I'm not remotely sure that it's even possible to get this done for Thursday, I'm too stubborn to give up and tell my advisor I just can't do this. It would be so humiliating.

Whatever happens it'll be over in 5 days, then I can sleep for a couple of days before getting back to the (less crazy) grind for ASMS. Maybe if I get lucky the data I'm killing myself for this week will be useful for that talk... Pretty sure a PhD isn't worth it.