School Fix

Ahh...perfect day. I got a nice school fix today. In the morning I met with another graduate student who is going to be sharing my office, actually it's Research Assistant #2. Then I met with my advisor; but she was in a flurry, trying to do too much. We talked for awhile about my results anyways . The results are very contradictory and hard to explain. She suggested I leave half of the results out because they consisted of a smaller subset of the data, in which the sample size was probably too small to have confidence in the results. Of course, I balked at that because the contradiction was the most interesting part. We were in the middle of our conversation when Fav Prof came by. Yeah! I was so excited to see that Fav Prof was on campus. So then I tried to see if I could meet with Fav Prof, while trying to make it clear that Advisor was still the advisor and I was going to be emailing Advisor the abstract about the findings were were discussing.

It was such a relief to talk with Fav Prof about the results. It felt like Advisor was too frazzled to really help out. Also, it appears that Fav Prof and I seem to talk and think on the same wavelength, whereas Advisor and I don't connect as well and sometimes I get frustrated when I talk with her. Fav Prof made two suggestions that were the same as Advisor's suggestions, but I seem to receive the suggestions so much better from Fav Prof. It could also be that Fav Prof suggested I separate the findings into two abstracts, whereas Advisor thought I should just drop one of the findings completely (which made me feel frustrated again, at least Fav Prof thought the results could be useful without trying to analyze them in connection to the other variable). Both thought I should look at the reaction time data as well. I'm pleased that the two advisors are giving similar advice.

Then I spent a considerable amount of time speaking "academic speak" with Fav Prof. Whew! I really needed that. Now I feel so much better about my missing-school blues. And my mind is full of exciting ideas spawned from the conversation.

Contented sigh....