Can’t have a rainbow without rain

What I mean by this is that I’ve found out that the pain of waking up early has rewards, and in particular one reward: increased productivity.

Every day this week I’ve woken up before 7am, usually between 630-7. This means that I haven’t had internet time every morning but all mornings I at least had time to check my e-mail.

My routine has been wake up, throw on robe and surf the web until 7am. Then I make coffee/breakfast and put on some actual¹ clothes. After eating I try to organize what I plan to do for the day. All of this means that I’m at top productivity by 8am and I have been working nonstop² until around noon.

This week I’ve been working on a chapter of my dissertation that I don’t plan to publish. Its likely only of local interest and specifically the interest of my funding agency. It may, however, find it’s way to a low-tier journal if I’m happy with the quality of the chapter or find something of greater interest than what I see now. The work I did of this nature for my master’s thesis made it’s way to a local journal which I’m certain is not peer-reviewed but I’ve been meaning to double check this. The journal does not come up in web of science searches and the manuscript was accepted without comments or changes. I was rejected from two other journals before we went to the local journal. The main thrust of the rejections said that my study was nothing new or exciting, just new data in a different area. I now think that I could have made a better argument in the manuscript that it is of broader interest, so maybe the Ph.D. me can actually publish this chapter but it’s not a goal I have to graduate. I was upset at the time of rejection because I’d read articles that are interesting but are really only presenting site specific data. Guess I should submit to the journals I read those articles in.

My productivity greatly decreases after lunch. I’ve been having lunch then exercising or vice versa. I ran outside yesterday!! My internet time has been increased and is now 1230-230. Ironically, I think I goof off less now that my internet time is longer. I guess I’ve just had a lot of work and personal chores to get done during this time this week. For example; I applied for financial aid, submitted a manuscript, e-mailed another manuscript to coauthors, did reference searches, dealt with tax issues and deal with the warrantee of our mattress³. Today, however, I plan to watch last nights episode of Lost and probably do another reference search. Tomorrow I’ll print the references I need.

But you know what? My productivity after lunch has been equal to my general productivity over the past few months, so I’m o.k. that its not as good as the morning time because the morning time is kicking ass. I also don’t feel very guilty for getting only a little done in the afternoons because, again, the morning kicked ass. I think this is all a mental game. I think that I am productive in the morning because, a) I get to check my e-mail and goof off (wake up) a little and so am not thinking about goofing off in the morning when I should be working, b) I have this inherent feeling that I’m just being lazy when I sleep in, so when I wake up late morning I have this bad feeling about myself before the day even begins and c) my husband wakes up early so it’s nice to see him in the morning and feel like we are on the same schedule.

1. Actual doesn’t always mean clothing I would leave the house in. What I wear depends on my mood and my exercise plan for the day. If I’m going to exercise before lunch why bother putting on real clothes to just change into exercise clothes later. I’ve read that your clothing can affect your attitude so I try not to be in “lazy” clothes if I’m feeling lazy.

2. Nonstop includes refreshing my coffee cup, getting water, relieving myself and sometimes making a mid morning snack.

3. This is an insane issue that I should blog on once it has been resolved.

What I want to be when I grow up

This post is inspired by something my husband said last week. He met a new post-doc at the non-academic lab he works at and this post-doc asked my husband, who is also a post-doc, “what number post-doc is this for you?” When he got home he told me that he wasn’t interested in having multiple post-doc positions and moving around the country (world) any more than we already have. He is now sitting in his home office learning a computer programming program so he can apply for a job in our dream location on the west coast. What he studies now is very theoretical, this job he is applying for is about studying earthquakes working for the government. The ad states that many days maybe spent doing field work in remote wilderness areas. This sounded so much more interesting to my husband than his many days/nights he spends on the beamline doing lab work. He also commented about how he is having trouble doing a new experiment at his current job because while he has a fellowship he has little money for research and no one (not the guy in the lab next door or a fellow researcher in another state) will collaborate him and let him use the apparatus he needs for his experiment.

I found this conversation with my husband interesting. I get the feeling that we are both ready to “nest.” You know, settle down, start our “real” lives. Buy a house, have a child, all of those “normal” things people do. I’ve been trying to tell myself for this past year that all will come in due time and just because we are 30-ish and haven’t achieved the “American dream” yet doesn’t mean we aren’t normal people. (I apologize for my over use of parenthesis quotations).

So this brings me to the title of this post, What I want to be when I grow up. My mom told me that the first job I wanted was to be a bath-tub-filler-upper. Cute? I guess my 5 year old brain noticed that I, myself, could not fill up my own bath. My mom had to do it. Hell, maybe she couldn’t even fill up her own bath. Imagine the market, all these people across the world needing their baths filled up. . . . .

My brain was easily influenced in elementary school. I remember an assembly where they showed a shriveled up lung, caused by smoking cigarettes and to this day I have never smoked one. We had a safety assembly and I came home and put buckle up stickers in my parents cars and was the buckle-up police well into high school. In addition, “I gave a hoot and didn’t pollute.” I conserved water and sometime around 3^rd grade I decided I wanted to save the earth. I remember we watched something on a TV in class about the environment. All I can remember now was at the end there were a bunch of actors stating ways to save the earth. I remember Chevy Chase stating that one should shower with a friend. And so began my quest as an environmentalist.

Some years later I heard about a big oil spill. At this point I decided that I wanted to be the person who went to the spill and cleaned up the soil.

Every summer I went with my mom and her family to this beautiful beach town for a week or two. This town happen to have a good university. My great grandma would drive me up there and give me tours of the campus. So, I put my desire to be an environmentalist together with these summer vacations and decided to go to that university to study environmental studies. It was here that I was told that I could not double major in ES and chemistry. So I switched to a geology major (I saw a flyer that stated geology is environmental studies and one of the careers it listed was soil scientist), where the requirements included chemistry and math, unlike the ES major (where they encouraged doubling in biology or politics). I had a one point decided I wanted to be an environmental lawyer but it only took one policy and politics class for me to decide that I’d rather be the person who did the science that policy was based on (hopefully in the next administration this will be true).

So for the next four years I studied to be a geologist. In my fourth year I landed a student position working with the USGS for a soil scientist. This position was great, I worked closely with three positive female role models, one was the chief scientist. We studied carbon budgets in the boreal forest and I got to do field work in Alaska and Canada and work with soil! I wasn’t cleaning it like I thought in elementary school but this was pretty much my dream job. They hired me as a technician after I graduate college. But I did more than just lab and field work. I also wrote reports, analyze data, they took me to meetings and I could propose my own research.

So how did it come to be that I left this job? A man. . . . my now husband took me away. We actually spent 15 months apart because there was no way in hell I was leaving the west coast and leaving my awesome job for some man. But then, I missed him, and I thought about it. Was a job really more important than this man I love? I decided not. So I applied to get my master’s degree where he was in dissertation town on the east coast. I got accepted and really love my research. In reality I may have never gone to graduate school if it wasn’t for my husband. I expected to quit at my master’s degree but I really loved the project and it was starting to get interesting so I stayed . .. . and now I’m struggling to finish.

Sorry this story is getting so long.
Now that I’m getting ready to graduate and find a job I have to ask myself, what do I want to do. If you go back a few paragraphs the answer would be save the earth, clean up soil, so why is it that I’m looking at job descriptions for faculty positions. My only answer to this is that it seems this is what someone does with a Ph.D. I had a conversation, about two years ago, at a laundry mat with someone from the humanities department and when I told him I didn’t want to be professor he gave me this look of discuss. When I look at positions with consulting companies I think to myself that I’ve just wasted the last four years of my life getting a Ph.D. I guess I could save the earth as a faculty member, you know in between teaching classes and administrative duties. I just know that there are so many of you out there who have dreamed of being a professor, that wasn’t my dream, so how can I compete with you all.

I think this idea of being a faculty member was also instilled in me at a meeting last spring. My adviser had a special session for him, for his 70^th bday, and the convener mentioned that something like 70% of his former students were now faculty. I thought, hey I could do that do. Two summers ago I mentored a young women in high school. I thought, hey this was cool, I like to mentor students in research. Can I mentor students if I work at a consulting firm? A few months ago I mentioned an old TA of mine came to stay with us. He is now at a university with no graduate students and his responsibilities are 75% teaching, 25% research. That sounded like a nice job. But how do I save the earth if I’m teaching 75% of the time.

*Sigh* I should stop now before this post gets abusively long. I had hoped by writing this all out I would get an epiphany and decide what to do with my life after graduation, but I feel just as confused now as I did when I started. I guess like I stated in my theme I just need to live in the moment and focus on my manuscripts and dissertation.

Tidbits

I have to admit that I've only partially been reading all your blogs. For some reason I have had no focus this week. I've been trying to read scientific papers and get through the abstracts and get bored. Then, yesterday, it happened. I started flowing, you know, my period started, I'm on the rag, ect. I feel that it is so unfair that my energy and attitude change this time of the month, and that I have cramps that make me want to stay in bed. Unfortunately I work from home so I can stay in bed. NO! I need to be productive.

Anyway, since I'm not able to focus I'm going to post a few bulletins of items I've been meaning to write about.

• "Soon I will post .... specifically about the undertone sexism such as posted here by Dr. Medusa." While I was in dissertation town I went to a comedy club with my friend and her husband (also a friend). This is the friend who recently had a baby, my godson. Someone they knew was one of the opening acts. (I should mention that the two opening acts and the headliner were women, a male comedian introduced all three of them and did short interludes of his own jokes.) While the entire night was a lot of fun I started to get a little agitated during the show once I realized that 80% of the jokes were about sex/gender, race or weight. I have to admit that some of these jokes are in deed funny, but I think it is important to think about why they are funny, and should they be funny. I decided not to say anything to my friends so not to depress their fun, but the opportunity came up a few days later and I had to bring it up. This friend is very open minded, a strong female and my good friend, so I was surprised when she said, "stereotypes are there for a reason." This is such an easy statement to make unfortunately it is not always true. Sometime stereotypes are not created by the "type" that is being stereo'd (?). There are times when these stereotypes are perpetrated by those who would like to repress a certain group. In addition stereotypes can be further instilled in the minds of the people as truth, or as blanket statements about a certain group of people, by constantly seeing the stereotype in the media. So, in summary, I would just like to remind everyone, if you don't already, to really think about what you laugh at and how funny it really is, not just to you but to the group that is being made fun of.
• 
  
• "I have officially applied for graduation and have a defense committee" Yes this is pretty exciting, but when I do the back calculations it doesn't seem plausible to turn in my dissertation by May 20th.
• Defend by April 20th
• Give dissertation to committee (5 people) by the first week in April.
• Go through a few drafts with adviser within the next 7 weeks.
  
• I'm not sure if my adviser is going to be as tough on my dissertation as he was with my master's thesis with somewhere around 10 drafts between us. I say this because he has told me that all I need to do is dump in my publications into a graduate school friendly documentation. But still 7 weeks is not a long time to go through 4-5 publications. One which I'm still waiting for data.
  
• My progress has increased since November. As one would hope, but I have yet to submit a publication. It is difficult to discuss publications here since I refer to them as numbers but one of the publications we re-decided to submit as a short letter, so I need to make the rest of the data not submitted in the letter exciting enough to submit as an additional manuscript.
• Not to mention how difficult it will be to organize 5 committee members, one from another state, at the end of a semester for my defense.
  
• Oh well, I've decided that summer won't be bad since I don't have a job lined up yet anyway. (which is also something I should blog about)
• 
  
• Dissertation town fun. Besides not getting to bed until 2am after the comedy show I had another week-end of late night fun. One Friday night I met some friends in a "city" for restaurant week. We went to a French restaurant since these are the gals that went with me to Europe/France this past September. Good times. Then we went to a bar that my friends rugby team was going to be at. This was also fun, even though I have bad feeling towards said rugby team. We got back to my friends house around 2am. Woke up, late, at 930am. We had planned to go to a bar in the morning to watch two of the six nations rugby tournament games. My friend made the executive decision to sleep in. Thank god. So we went to a diner for breakfast and then lounged on the couch and watched TV until 2ish. It was, then, off to the city for more fun. We just walked around and saw some sights and then met up with my old rugby team and other teams for karaoke night. More fun! I really miss these gals. But yet again I didn't get to sleep (in my office) until 2am-ish. So with all this lack of sleep I still managed to wake up at 9am (to a phone call) and get some work done before lunch with old lab mates. They both graduated with their master's degree and now work for consulting companies. One works for a large international company and another for a small two office company. It was interesting listening to their stories. After lunch I stayed up until midnight getting samples analyzed. It was not until Monday after swimming that my headache started, reminding me that I need my sleep.
  

Let's hope my concentration comes back soon.

Back to School

I'm so tired today. It's amazing how much more effort goes into work when you aren't working at home. I did a little bit of field work today, some lab work, caught up with people in the department and went through all the junk in my mailbox.

I really enjoyed lab work, but I guess it made me tired to stand around making dilutions. I have more to do tomorrow, more lab work, not dilutions. All that should be finished by wed.

I also had a good talk with my adviser today. Tomorrow we will talk more about research and specifically manuscript "0"

This week-end was fun. I went to a comedy show but didn't get to bed until 2am-ish. I didn't drink too much so I didn't feel too old.
Then on sunday I had the baptism. I'm a godparent. It was a nice ceremony in the catholic church with only the immediate family. We then had lunch at a fun polish pub next door. Well not exactly next door to the church but we walked there. That would be funny. In the midwest I actually live in the town of churches and taverns. I find this funny.

Since there was a recent post from unbalanced reaction about traveling I thought I'd tell everyone my flight schedule from saturday.
Wake up at 530am.
Leave house at 610am. I wanted to leave at 6 but husband was slacking off.
Arrive at airport at 640am.
Already had boarding pass so I proceeded to the security check in.
Settle at boarding gate around 650am (I saw different clocks and didn't have my own).
Read for a while, decided I should pee.
Gathered belongings and went to the restroom.
Sat back down by boarding gate, read for a while, proceeded to get in line (Southwest) to board plane, for a 730AM departure. Yep, I'm sure that's what everyone was waiting for. I woke up two hours before my plane was schedule to leave. Too stressful, right?

All was well until everyone boarded and the pilot announced that they didn't get enough fuel the first time and we needed to wait for more fuel. Glad we didn't make the mistake of taking off without enough, but you sometimes wonder how these mistakes happen.

Oh and it's warmer here in dissertation town. Yeah!

Not living in the moment

So it's only been a day since I set my theme and I realized that today I've been thinking and talking about events that I don't have control over that will happen in the future and thus I have NOT been living in the moment.

My godchild is to be christened soon and I can't book my flight back to dissertation town until I know this date. I would like this date to be soon so I can do some work at my campus in dissertation town. I would also like to book my flight so that I can plan social events there and here and before the price becomes too much.

Ok-Jennie-breath and let it go. I will now finish making data plots and live in the moment.

I guess old habits are hard to break.

What have you done with my adviser

Yesterday I had my weekly meeting with my adviser. I called him because it seemed he didn't get my e-mail on Monday. I hate checking/sending e-mail through the web but can't get lotus notes to download on my laptop. Anyway we had a phone meeting instead of skype.
If you don't remember, the last meeting with my adviser I spoke my mind and didn't seem to get my point across and my adviser said finishing my dissertation (or maybe just this resubmit) is like making fine wine.
Well, this same person yesterday told me that it shouldn't be a problem to graduate by May. Wow. Maybe my sticking up for myself helped? And maybe the fact that I told him how awesome I was at the conference helped. His simple statement has made me regret all the mean thoughts I've had towards him in the last year. He also said that this resubmit will be the most difficult manuscript to write. It is on a subject that is well established and we are saying HEY try evaluating this subject in a brand new way. The other 3-4 manuscripts I'm writing are on a different subject, one that only began in 1998 and is recently still gaining understanding and incite, thus my papers will be a large contribution to the field. It is this subject that I presented at the recent meeting where everyone said "oh you are Jennie."

So I'd like to retract everything I've said previously about adviser that was negative and say, "my adviser is great!"
let's see what I say next week :)

On another note, I haven't gotten very much work done this week, between being sick and now being bloated I don't feel like working. I did call a lab today since we are confused about the data they sent us (for the resubmit). They were going to check the lab notes about the dilution factor. And I pretty much am still waiting on bits and pieces for the other manuscripts so I don't feel too guilty about slacking off since there isn't a whole lot to do. I could probably look up journal articles and reread my intro for the dissertation.
I'm going to pick up my sister from school today. She has a half day, and she's in 6th grade if I haven't mentioned this already. We are going to do some xmas shopping, I have yet to buy one present, well maybe one, and then we are going to make granola bars. These will be my home made present this year. I've decided I'm only buying real presents for family under 18 and everyone else gets a gift card and/or granola bars. Although I'll likely buy something for my mom's car, brakes or tires.
I just don't feel like I see my close friends enough to know what they want/need. It's sad. But I'm really just happy to see them and hopefully if I stop buying things for them they will stop buying things for me. Last year my husband got a power drill from my best friends husband. Um, we already have one. Needless to say we re-gifted it. I've always been a fan of this and usually call it recycling.

Progress

I'm tired of counting words. It's getting complicated. I'm at 49% and you think I could not give up and count enough to make it to 50% but I'm done. With that said, I am really happy with my progress this past month. I didn't make the exact goals I had hoped for but I've gotten a lot of writing done, most of it revisions which makes counting difficult.
I've actually done a lot of work putting together my dissertation which I didn't think I'd start until January, but since I'm waiting for other people on my publications I thought I might as well do some of it (since I needed to increase my word count). I'd like to show my outline here and mention how much I've done (to pat myself on my back). The outline was only written in October.

Ch. 1 INTRODUCTION (isn't it always).
This is finished! Granted some was cut and pasted from manuscripts I'm working on and/or edited from my masters thesis but still. It is five pages and has three sections. It could likely be longer but each individual chapter will have have an intro. so this is just basic info and you know the summary about what the dissertation is about. The first section is background info about the hydrogeology of the study area. The second two sections are info about the two major groundwater contaminants I work with, so heath impacts, sources of contamination, ect. You can always put in more info about other peoples work but I feel like I've summarized pretty good and included the major review papers.
Ch 2. Contaminant #1
This has four subsections, three of which are going to be publications. So once those are done I'll cut and paste and format into dissertation. The last subsection I've written this past week. I didn't think it was going to be enough data for a manuscript but now that I've written it up I'm thinking it could be. It's only the second data set of it's kind on this contaminant so I think it deserves to get out there. But I'll wait until the other papers have been submitted and then think about it again.
Ch 3. Major chemistry of contaminant #1 and #2 sources.
This is more of an appendix style chapter. I've written the text, it's about a page, and will make the tables once the last of the data comes in. Part of this is the manuscript I'm resubmitting. So I refer to it but again this is more of a look at all this data, maybe somebody later can use it in a different way than I have, and most of the data has been interpreted in other sections.
Ch 4. About contaminant #2
I wrote the text for this today up until the results section. That's when things get hard :) This is a continuation of my master's thesis. Where the masters had a years worth of data this is four years of data, plus some changes to the study sites, so new data. It's really interested but maybe not publishable since I've been told it's only important locally and doesn't have a broad impact. Most of this data analysis has been done for abstracts but I need to think about it again and organize my thoughts better before I write the results and discussion. I will likely try to submit it once life has settled. There is a local journal I submitted the master's thesis data to.

Ok, then there is a nice conclusion/summary chapter and of course the abstract of the dissertation. These are things that will be completed last so they aren't on the radar yet.

I feel great. Thanks InaDWriMo.

More words

Yesterday felt very productive. I wrote 289 words in my dissertation and am up to 711 words in manuscript #3. I think internet free fridays are going to be a great idea.
I also have lots of blog reading to keep myself busy this saturday afternoon. After I catch up it's back to writing!