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Oh look, I found a new pit of despair
Posted by on April 9, 2012
So you know that I handed my draft manuscript in to my advisor last week. He sent back a document covered in red ink. Then my labmates pointed out all the dumb things I did, and showed me all the cool things I COULD have done but didn’t.
My advisor, a real funny guy, said, “You should make a new graph about the revision process,” and I was all, “Ha ha ha that’s so funny.”
And then I started working on the revisions.
It’s not funny.
Since the start of the long weekend I have been fully immersed in a new and and apparently much larger despair-pit, as I fumble around with R (a programming language that I’m still learning) and unfamiliar statistical methods. I think, if I can get my mathematically-challenged brain past this stats hurdle, I’ll get to the point where I feel ready to REVISE ALL THE THINGS with greater gusto.
The sad thing is, I suspect that I’m going to have to adjust the low-end of my y-axis to accommodate the deepest depths of despair that almost invariably follow after one actually submits the manuscript to the JOURNAL, whose editors then tell you that you have to, once again, REVISE ALL THE THINGS.
*cry*
Cheer up li’l BugGeek, we haves faith in you.
*sniff* thanks
Too funny!
NOT FUNNY.
I’m already looking forward to next Monday’s graph! At the rate you’re moving on that manuscript it’ll be the post-acceptance celebratory beer drinking graph!
I hope I’ll be finished with this thing before Monday!!!! (People will get sick of me if I keep whinging about the same manuscript for weeks on end :P)
This is great! I am experiencing the discussion “I will never be a scientist” phase. It is nice to know that other scientists (or biology grad students) feel this despair as well 😉 Thanks for making me smile. Good luck with R!
My own supervisor left a comment on my original post about this process (and that awful discussion pit), and said that pretty much everybody (even professors!) go through this stuff. I’m glad this made you smile at least!
Love the humor you throw into your posts!! I always find myself enjoying your posts the whole way through. Agreed, editors will not hesitate to go out of their way to criticize. If your blog posts are anything like your project,,,, they won’t take you seriously.
BUT, if you put as much care into your project as you do your blog (from what I can see) I bet it’ll turn out quite nicely 🙂
As much as I’m moaning about the revisions, the honest truth is that I got some really excellent and insightful feedback from my advisor and colleagues and I know that the final product is going to be much stronger and more cohesive in the end (and therefore more likely to get accepted!). The revisions are painful, but definitely worth it!
Oi, I hate that feeling, too. If it helps, we all get that; that feeling of despair is why I started Rejection Watch. Even if it has petered out, the response I got was more than indicative of the generality of that pit you’re in.
And hey, if R is giving you trouble, don’t forget that more than a few of your followers on Twitter are reasonably competent with the devil stats package; I’d even include myself in that club, and if I can dare to speak for the lot of us, we’d be happy to help. 🙂
Good luck with the revisions! (Seriously, though, is the figure at the end of the graph holding a torch? Because that strikes me as being .. unsafe?)
Thanks Steve, I forgot about using Twitter as an R sounding board. Right now I feel like I have to wallow it for a little while, if only to make sure that I really THINK about it (and therefore, ideally, understand it better in the long run)…but after I get past that point I may come crying to my tweeps 🙂
As for the cartoon in the graph, it comes from here:
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.ca/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html
(If you don’t know this comic blog, you should. It’s not very active right now but the archives are well worth a read.)
Ha! I forgot that that particular post actually begins with a graph too! LOL!
oh how i absolutely love this – plus addition of hyperbole and half wonderfulness! you can do it, you can do it! i’m currently in the “waiting for collaborator revision”, which is basically speaking into the microphone of an empty room….is this thing still on? 😉
also…..R. I can sum that up in one word…ugggggggggggggh.
LOL! My partner comes home and says “what were you doing all day?”, and I say, “Aaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”. Also, why do I not have your blog linked to mine yet? Fixed! 😀
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I feel for you. It’s frustrating as hell! I was unable to publish 2 papers, because the stats were just too difficult for me. Back then, we had different stats programs. I even contacted the president of the local statistical club (yes, I was amazed to find out there are such organizations) to ask if I could actually pay someone good money to help me get the stats done. No one in the club was interested. Big bummer.
Ha! I remember when I was an MSc. student, I was all “I’ll just pay someone to do my stats for me”. So much for that idea! 😀
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