| | [Mood:   Crushed]
You used to get it in your fishnets
Now you only get it in your night dress
Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness
Landed in a very common crisis
Everything's in order in a black hole
Nothing seems as pretty as the past though
That Bloody Mary's lacking a Tabasco
Remember when he used to be a rascal?
-Fluorescent Adolescent, by the Arctic Monkeys
I was planning to make a post this week, about my cool new life as a second year genetic counseling student. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at Mercy Hospital, observing (and doing!) prenatal genetic counseling. I actually got to go in and counsel patients on my own yesterday. I thought it was pretty damn cool. I thought, maybe I don't suck as bad as I thought...
Well, apparently, I do. I met with some of my thesis committee today. And that didn't go too well. Each meeting (I've only had two, really,) have left me feeling like an unprepared idiot. It baffles me a little, because I feel like, based on the students from last year, I am WAY ahead of the curve. I keep going back to the thought that, Lori thought I'd be able to be done with data collection by now, so surely getting it submitted to the IRB shouldn't be this freaking hard.
For those of you who don't know what the heck I'm talking about, here is a general guideline of how to write a thesis:
1. Design an experiment.
2. Submit said experiment to the Institutional Review Board (IRB).
3. Once IRB approved, carry out said experiment.
4. Analyze data.
5. Write up thesis. (This consists of a huge background section, in which you explain why you did what you did, and a basic journal article, in which you explain what you did and what you found.)
So, I'm still on step 1, here. The really frustrating part is, I designed the experiment and wrote out the stuff to submit to the IRB for class last fall. I got an A in the class. Now, if my design and background was really so weak as to justify many, many additions and revisions, why did I get an A in the class?
I'm supposed to have hypotheses. I have specific aims, but those appear to not be enough. In today's meeting, I was told that you're supposed to go over every hypothesis and explain your justification for what you think will happen (based on literature review) and how you're going to test it. That sounds like it should go in the background section, to me, since it involves so much literature review. So I asked, does this go in with the specific aims (which comes before the background) or after the background? And they were like, uhm, duh, it goes in the specific aims section. Don't you remember the class where we wrote one of these? Yay, I feel like an idiot.
I'm begining to understand why they kept telling us that we didn't understand how busy the summer would be. It's the "learn how to swim" semester. Also, I may have to retake Embryology after all. School sucks.
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| | Posted 6/11/2009 11:20 AM - 15 Views - 6 eProps - 4 comments
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