Crunch Time

Amazingly, July is nearly at its end. This means report-writing time is coming. Crap!

Of the three "real" work reports I've written during past terms, two were simply summaries of existing data that the company would've collected anyway, and one was a quick two-week project on getting a gadget to work with a new method. I sit down, spend one week typing (or procrastinating), and that is that.

This time, I have a huge obstacle*: data collection is nowhere near completion! I can't write about a system if I don't even know how it behaves!

At my current rate of one data point per machine per day, I'd be lucky to finish data collection even before my work term ends, much less write a report about the data. Unfortunately, most of the time is non-negotiable: there's (obviously) no making an instrument analyze samples faster without compromising results, and other people in the lab will need to use the instruments, too. This is assuming that the samples cooperate in the first place, which they have a recalcitrant tendency not to.

Recently, I began to go to the lab earlier so I can maybe squeeze in two samples (if I'm lucky), but to be honest, I'd rather not work 11-hour days** - my brain gets fried too quickly, and that causes mistakes that'd otherwise not occur. Furthermore, as an undergraduate, I'm not really supposed to be in the lab during off-hours at all***.

I still haven't gotten them calculations straightened out, either. As I said, no motivation whatsoever other than a sense of obligation. Sigh.

There's also a final exam that I must study for. Really must. I have a feeling I'll avoid that particular task until the day (or two) before the final, alas.

(Actually, to be completely honest, I also have a feeling that this entire project I'm working on is completely unpublishable, for various reasons. Four months of work and nothing to show for it, sigh. But that's another story.)

*One other obstacle being my supervisor. But the grousing alone will take up a whole another post, one which I won't actually post for obvious reasons. Let's just say that he'd find me much easier to work with a few years ago when I was more... pliant. Or at least not as vociferously opinionated, anyway.
**12-hour days are quite doable, but only if there is substantial off-time (e.g. long weekends, holidays/breaks) to compensate. Which is clearly not the case here. Caffeine is good too.
***I can understand the rationale - undergrads are intrinsically never as trustworthy as grad students/postdocs - but it irks me all the same.