Recovery
One of the greatest nightmares of every graduate student is to have your project scooped by a competitor lab. I’m not sure if I was scooped, but I was greatly distressed when shown an accepted manuscript of a publication on almost exactly what I am intending to publish a few months from now. Now that another lab has published first, the impact of my work has been greatly reduced and I would have to think of new spins to the story in order for things to be novel and publishable.
For a while I was worried that my thesis / graduation might be jeapordized. But it seems that if I do three projects concurrently, I have enough contingencies built in. Well, life is going to be a bit busier from now on.
Lots of things went through my mind in the past week - evaluation of my working relationship with supervisors, my own reaction to work crisis, learning points, discouragement, resentment, frustration, and feeling misunderstood for having to spend so much time in the lab. I guess this is the real heat of grad school - when the pressure to compete to the press is on, when the clock towards graduation is ticking, and when you realize that you have to produce results for the thousands of dollars being sunk in week in and week out on experimentation. Gone are the days when complacency could be tolerated. I only pray that God will use this crucible to refine and to mold his vessel.
Am glad for a weekend of recovery. Spent the friday evening eating KL-style Hokkien Mee, drinking Heineken, and reading 射雕英雄傳 at the neighborhood coffee shop - the almost perfect way for the introverted me to relax. I’m not sure if I look forward to going back to work tomorrow, but I’m not surprised about times like this - and not surprised that there will be moments of great test of perserverance, and for this case, dependency on God.