Slides, robots, and figures. Oh no!

Since there’s a mile long list of things I need to get done this weekend, let’s just grab the top three time consuming things and cram them together into one post! When I took on the full-time job while (hopefully) wrapping up my PhD, I didn’t expect for things to be so… busy? Okay, things are always busy, that’s a theme of any PhD journey, but it does feel a bit excessive lately!

Hospital-PI is worried about the workload I have, but as I keep reminding him, I always have a huge workload. So while we’re both a little anxious about finishing up my PhD, he’s still giving me a long list of things to accomplish for his lab. Why? Well because I always get the work done, but more importantly I’m the most experienced (aside from him of course), so I’m the only one who can really do the work at the moment. We’re hoping that will change soon, but for now I’m all we’ve got.

For the hospital side of things I have the figures I’ve been frantically working on. I’ve successfully finished Figure 1! At least I think I have, I’m still debating a little about it. Figure 1 is probably the hardest of the figures I need to make, which is why I’ve been working on it the longest. That’s the good(ish) news. The bad news is I still have four more figures I need to make, some statistics to run, and just some general odds and ends to wrap up the experiment. All the data are processed though! So it’s a mixed bag, but today is the day I need to finish it, because if it doesn’t get finished today, well then it may not get done. Otherwise something else will have to give.

Because on the school side of things I need to finish my slides for my dissertation proposal… date still in the works. It should be happening in roughly 2 weeks and there are still some minor modifications school-PI asked me to address that I haven’t touched yet because of the hospital stuff I’m working on. With the written proposal finalized, I just need to update the slides with some additional information or adjust the information already added. It shouldn’t be too much work exactly, but it is time and time is something I don’t have a lot of this weekend. Because there’s more!

This has nothing to do with school-PI or hospital-PI because it’s old! Or the work was, but robot paper was finally accepted for publication (here)!!!! I’m incredibly thrilled to finally get out of that mess, but there are some things that need to happen before we send it for print. We were asked to modify some of the figures, which will take a significant amount of time. The journal requires us to separate our submission into three parts.

First a PDF of the full manuscript so they can publish it online. The second is just the text with figure captions at the end of the text. While the figure adjustments will definitely take time (because it’s been literally years since I’ve looked at them and I’m not even sure where on my computer they are now) the rearranging the manuscript will take even longer. The third part isn’t too bad, it’s just all the figures numbered in the order they appear so each figure would be its own file with figure 1 being the first figure and so on.

I’ve set a deadline for myself to get the modifications made and sent to my co-authors for review before we send it off to the journal. It will from what I recall, since it’s been years since we discussed this, be open access. When it goes live, you can bet I will be discussing the paper thoroughly and spamming just about every account I have with it. While this is the third paper accepted, it’s the first, first author paper I’ve written. So probably not great, but not bad either if I can say so. Plus the engineering behind the robot was very impressive if I do say so myself.

Out of all the stuff that needs to happen this weekend the robot paper and hospital figures are going to take by far the longest. Meaning today it’s hospital work and tomorrow it’s robot work. If I have time I’ll squeeze in the dissertation proposal stuff, if not I can try to get it finished during the week sometime. I’m assuming we’re practicing again next school lab meeting, so I want to be ready to go for that.

So yeah, this is yet another post with a long list of stuff that needs to be done, but it helps me plan and having it written out is a good sanity check for someone who isn’t all that sane. Because if I read it and it sounds off, then there’s a good chance something will need to be adjusted.

I wish I could write about some of the other amazing things that happened, like last Wednesday we did something so amazing I had several different recordings of the event, buuuut I can’t share it. Not yet anyway, so instead you just get to hear me tease about it. Is that mean? Probably, but it also sucks to be on this side and not get to tell the world all the cool stuff going on.