The endlessly rotating wheel of chaos
Oh, grad school, how we love thee. And hate thee. Often simultaneously. (See pertinent Ph.D. Comic here.)
Regular readers of this blog should by now be familiar with my habit of rotating among several different projects, working on one data analysis while I wait on my collaborators to review my work on another. Occassionally, I stall out on all my projects at the same time, but there's usually enough work to go around. This week has been no exception.
I've got my dropstone manuscript, which is just waiting for approval from my supervisor before I can submit it for publication. My thesis introduction has taken a rest on the desks of my committee members. Then there's my shipwreck project, awaiting a sweep of my adviser's critical eyes before I send it to my other co-authors for review. So what is a grad student supposed to do while she waits?
Pull out another manuscript, of course, and add it to the endlessly rotating wheel of chaos.
This particular project concerns onuphid polychaetes, and if you have no idea what those two words mean, you're not alone. They're worms that live in tubes on the seafloor. To move, they extend their bodies a little bit out of their tubes, stick their heads in the soft ground, and pull the rest of their body along behind. It's really incredible to watch. Check out a video of a crawling onuphid polychaete from Indonesia here.
While I was on the Atlantis cruise this summer, a couple shipmates and I started making field notes and observations of an onuphid polychaete called Hyalinoecia artifex that was common in our study area. By the end of the cruise, we had assembled a manuscript and decided to submit it to a journal. I heard back from the journal just last week, so I've been working on revising the paper according to the reviewer's suggestions. I'm an ecologist, not a polychaete expert, so I was actually quite grateful for the reviewers' constructive criticism.
Maybe by the time I'm finished with this manuscript, another one will be ready to go!
Regular readers of this blog should by now be familiar with my habit of rotating among several different projects, working on one data analysis while I wait on my collaborators to review my work on another. Occassionally, I stall out on all my projects at the same time, but there's usually enough work to go around. This week has been no exception.
I've got my dropstone manuscript, which is just waiting for approval from my supervisor before I can submit it for publication. My thesis introduction has taken a rest on the desks of my committee members. Then there's my shipwreck project, awaiting a sweep of my adviser's critical eyes before I send it to my other co-authors for review. So what is a grad student supposed to do while she waits?
Pull out another manuscript, of course, and add it to the endlessly rotating wheel of chaos.
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| Hyalinoecia artifex, photographed in their tubes on board R/V Atlantis, July 2015. |
While I was on the Atlantis cruise this summer, a couple shipmates and I started making field notes and observations of an onuphid polychaete called Hyalinoecia artifex that was common in our study area. By the end of the cruise, we had assembled a manuscript and decided to submit it to a journal. I heard back from the journal just last week, so I've been working on revising the paper according to the reviewer's suggestions. I'm an ecologist, not a polychaete expert, so I was actually quite grateful for the reviewers' constructive criticism.
Maybe by the time I'm finished with this manuscript, another one will be ready to go!
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