N: Nettled

According to the thesaurus, nettled means annoyed. It's the closed N word I could find that really describes how I felt on Friday afternoon (shockingly, there are no "N" synonyms for upset, depressed, sad, or angry!). I need to vent about it, but I'm going to try to find a way to do so without revealing too much information. Before I start, the end result is that yes, I have permission to write, and yes, I'll be going back to medical school in June. But the process to get there was unbelievably upsetting. I felt pretty confident going into my meeting - I had met with one of my committee members two weeks prior, and he was completely impressed with what I'd done and said that everything looked fantastic - and he's the person on the committee who knows the most about my work. Then last week, I practiced both in front of my lab and with my unofficial mentor. I had almost no corrections to make and everybody said that my talk was great. So based on those three experiences, I wasn't expecting anything too horrible in my meeting.

I knew right off the bat that they weren't happy - the first thing they asked about was my return date to medical school. They all kind of looked at each other when I told them it was in mid-June and that I had to defend before that. "Well, that doesn't give you very much time," one of them said. "I know, but I'm really committed to this, and I've been trying to write as I go," was my response.  "Well, good for you," was one of the seemed-sarcastic-to-me-but-may-not-have-been responses. Then I started my talk. I got ripped apart on EVERY SINGLE SLIDE. Two of them were playing a who-can-ask-more-questions game between themselves. When I showed the crux of my work, in the second half of the talk, one of them actually said, "Well, it's a good thing you did this work; otherwise, I would have been very upset." Um, okay. I knew the work was important for me to make any kind of conclusion for my research, which is why I did it! The whole meeting was like that. The only time any of them seemed remotely impressed was when someone made a comment that I needed to think about future directions and targets to test, and I told them a few things that I've been thinking about for that part of the thesis. 

On the way back to the lab, even my advisor told me that she thought they were very negative when I was in the room, but were much more positive when I was outside and they were talking among themselves. Would it really kill them to say something nice to ME? The thing that upset me the most is that I was really hoping to graduate this spring. It doesn't look like any of them are really excited about that possibility, and I'll most likely be a summer graduate. I know that it's not a big deal in terms of my future or anything like that, but it felt horribly devastating at the time, and I spent a few hours crying in my unofficial mentor's office immediately following the meeting. This week, some of the reasons that they were so cranky and nit-picky have come out - I'm not going to share them here, but none of them actually has to do with me as a person or me as a scientist.

As of this weekend, all of my experiments will have been performed - it'll be a few weeks before I get all of the data from them, but hopefully this is it for me. I'm in mad-writing mode right now in the library, and I'm hoping to have a solid draft for me to start revising and re-revising by next Friday. 

links: technorati