It Hits the Fan

In a stark contrast to my tendencies as an undergrad, life as a grad student has forced me to get my work done well in advance. I guess it was a byproduct of feeling constantly overwhelmed throughout my first year.

This new policy has proven itself to be just what the doctor ordered. It's even attenuated my neuroses a bit. Sometimes, though, it's not enough.

Last spring, for example, with finals approaching, I had a term project due in Pattern Recognition. I finished it 2 weeks early, leaving only the Powerpoint presentation on the to-do list. With 1 week to go, my laptop got stolen. This screwed me in every single class, but particularly in Pattern Rec. Fortunately, it wasn't too hard to recreate my code from memory and rerun everything. It was frustrating, especially as I kept making the same mistakes as I had weeks earlier, but it worked out well.

I've continued to be pretty good about staying ahead of schedule. Even when I got a little ambitious last month and submitted 2 different abstracts to the same conference, I knew it would just take a little more discipline to meet the deadlines. I've been cutting it close, but my workload has left me just enough time for training and racing and karaoke (the three basic elements of a Rutgers Cycling lifestyle).

So yesterday and today were the days wherein I would do my data analysis and make my posters. Yesterday went about as smoothly as can be expected. Today started off well...

And then I realized that half of my data was missing. The software worked perfectly, except instead of writing to excel files every time, sometimes it just created an excel file without writing to it. Half of the data from each subject was lost forever. And I need all of their data. So, that project was ruined.

Except it couldn't be ruined. I have to present it on Friday. There is no choice; I have to start from scratch and complete the entire project by Wednesday.

Whose fault is it? I'm going to take the hit on this one. While the software was written by somebody else, I'm the pointman on this project, and it was on me to ensure that it worked. How it broke between the next-to-last version and the final version we used, I will never know. I've learned my lesson, though, and I'm moving on.

So around noon I started writing emails. I solicited subjects from the BME department, I begged for volunteers from the Cycling listserv, I even wrote emails to people I hadn't seen in months to call in old favors. The odds were stacked against me, as I can't reuse subjects, I can't use lefties or anyone remotely ambidextrous, and it's midterms-week.

Fortunately, the response has been overwhelming. By 6pm, I had to start turning volunteers away. My friends are truly great people, and I am grateful in the most superlative sense of the word.

This still leaves data analysis. And poster making. I will probably not be sleeping tonight, and I'm going to have to let classwork and other responsibilities fall by the wayside for the rest of the week, but this will get done.

I will say this: It takes a lot more than a ruined project to break me. Nice try, though, universe.