A forgotten paper

Well it happens I guess, after looking through my posts, I haven’t seen one where I discussed another paper I’m working on (because there always seems to be many). I am like 82% sure I’ve mentioned it in passing, but I can’t find a post on it, so today we’re talking about the forgotten paper. Don’t worry we’ll come up with a better name before I finish the post, but for now let’s talk about why it slipped my mind.

Engineering design is an important concept, almost everything we have relies on a design to make it function or to impart certain benefits to the thing being made. For example, I recently published robot paper (this one), which used biomimicry to create an entire bipedal walking robot for balance testing. I do enjoy that sort of engineering, but since I started my PhD I switched gears to neuroengineering and signal processing/classification. It’s awesome, rewarding, and I think it’s a lot of fun. I’ve recently had a bunch of papers published which represent years worth of work on the subject. Not too bad if I say so myself!

Which is probably also why I’ve been working on this paper, but forgot to even talk about it. This paper, which I think we’ll just call model paper since it’s a solid modeling project, has been years of work. When the undergrad Kay, who is no longer an undergrad (go Kay!) and I started this project almost four years ago! It’s a fairly impressive feat of engineering and she was the main person who did the work, so this will be her first journal paper (all from work as an undergrad, I did say how impressive she is, right?) and I’m her co-first author. I offered to let her take the spot solo, but she refused, so we’re sharing first authorship.

Which is somewhat embarrassing that I’ve forgotten to even dedicate a post to the thing! We’ve mostly written the manuscript, but between Kay moving to her new school and life stuff, it’s been somewhat slower than we’ve wanted it to be. We’re nearing completion of the paper though and I’m hopeful we can submit it in the next few weeks, where Kay will learn the joys of peer-review. Ideally we’ll get this submitted and published before she starts her PhD. I’m getting strong déjà vu feelings about all this because robot paper was supposed to be a publish before I started my PhD paper and instead it turned out to be a publish as I’m near the end of my PhD paper.

I’m fairly confident this will have an easier time than robot paper did, but honestly I don’t understand why robot paper had such a hard time getting published, so I’m probably dealing with a bit of PTSD from that whole ordeal. I’m going to try not to think about it too much as we get ready to submit this work, I think it’s impressive and so does school-PI or we wouldn’t be publishing it, but even that sounds familiar so yeah… not going to think about it.

I do hope that Kay’s introduction to peer-review (specifically for journal papers) goes a little smoother than my first journal paper submission (robot paper). But even if it doesn’t I’ll remind her that it’s not a common thing and she shouldn’t expect other works to be so difficult to get published. At least I’ve already been there and went through all of that so I can reassure her that it’s okay. I had my co-authors reassuring me, but I think it’s a little different when you have a fellow student saying it.

In any case, as usual I can’t give any hints away about what the paper is on. I’m excited to share it though and it’s really going to make people confused when they look at my published works because this will be yet another offshoot into something different for me. It’s all related, I swear.