Papers, experiments, and the week ahead

It’s going to be a busy week and the weekend has only just started. While I plan on taking some time to myself this weekend, I am going to be prepping for the week ahead today since tomorrow is halloween. There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening this week, so today I want to round up all the odds and ends to give you an idea of what the week will look like, but also to help me organize my thoughts as I get ready.

Since my first journal paper has been published (woo!) I haven’t mentioned any of the progress that has happened with the other papers, or if I did, I’ve forgotten about it. Which in my world is just as good as it never happening. To recap, I have four first author papers I’ve been juggling. Four, as in four separate papers. I don’t know about other students, but that feels like a lot for me. That’s just the first author side of it too, I also have two journal papers where I’m second author. We will talk about those too, but I do have some updates on the status of the four first author papers.

Technically three now since I’ve already had one accepted and published (I talk about that here). As of right this moment, I have one of the remaining three in review and the other two should be submitted here in the next few days to start the review process. There will almost certainly be back and forth on all of these papers and I expect to need to revise each of them at least once before getting them published. It will be a slow(ish) process, but I’m hopeful that within the next four to six months they will all be published and life will (hopefully) not be that hectic ever again.

This week both remaining papers need to be submitted. Need is a strong word, but my school-PI did use the word need for at least one of the two papers and the other one, which is a project with my hospital-PI, keeps getting pushed back because we keep revising it. We’re both tired of working on the paper, so he’s expressed wanting it done ASAP for several weeks now. We’re close though and I think after this weekend I should have the paper ready for submission. Once all that is done I will get at least a few weeks of rest from those projects as they get to reviewers and what not.

There are two papers where I’m second author on. The first is under review now and the second is a paper we’re still in the process of working through. The first author is one of the postdocs at the hospital lab and it will be his first paper from our lab. It’s a very interesting project and I’m glad to be helping out with it. I’m not sure when we plan on submitting that one, but it’s still very rough around the edges. Once it gets a little more polished I’ll have a better idea about when it will be submitted, but hopefully sometime this next month. More than likely it will end up being sometime in December though, because these things take longer than you think they should/

With all the papers we’re writing you would think that I would have my hands full. You would be correct! But that doesn’t mean the rest of the work can stop. This week I’m back in the OR and this time we have consent to do the experiment! The person who agreed to work with us is a better candidate for what we’re trying to do anyway, so this works out quite nicely. The equipment for the experiment is not setup yet, but that’s because it’s being loaned to another lab at the moment. So I’ll be in bright and early Monday morning to set everything up and hopefully by the time we’re off to surgery everything will be tested and ready to go.

I also am giving a presentation at the end of the week for a conference. The project I was doing last year, the one I lovely refer to as the project I didn’t really care for (here’s an example). That is actually why one of the papers needs to get published this week, because I am giving the final report for the project to the people who funded it. I’m excited to have that done so I can focus on my other stuff finally. This project has been hanging over my head FOREVER! It’s been such a rough learning experience, but I’m finally done, my school-PI is very happy with my work, and I can close this little chapter once and for all. Let me just say it’s nice finishing something for once and while the paper still needs to go through the review process, I’m done enough that I feel like it’s the end, which is basically the same thing.

The middle of the week will (hopefully) give me a chance to finish the other stuff I need to get done for the two papers we’re about to submit. I have another experiment which I’m leading (or rather trying to organize) so there will be equipment testing, meeting with a friend of my hospital-PI, who is bringing us some new custom built equipment to test out, and I need to get my slides, talk, and poster ready for the conference where I was awarded a speaking slot (here). I also need to find time to write an IRB, meeting with my surgeon-PI to discuss some things (I’ll see him Monday in the OR, but that’s probably not a good time for a conversation).

So you can see why I plan on taking tomorrow to fully turn into a sausage and not do anything.