Stress

I think I have to come up with a good game plan to finish my Masters, and evaluate what I haven't been doing correctly so far.

My main goal, right now, is to finish in August 2011, and to eventually publish with the data I obtain. I don't mind working after I'm done to get the paper out, but I feel that in order to be taken seriously, and my degree to really mean something, I have to publish.

I have a lot of experiments to get done, and animal work can be an absolute bitch. I wasted so much time in early January doing an experiment that wasn't working, because our previous lab tech forget to tell me a pretty important point about it. Thankfully it got sorted out...but such a waste of time, antibodies, and mice.

The main thing is that I am not entirely sure what experiments I need to do. I have been so busy, since before the Christmas break, trying to optimise the baseline experiment, that I haven't given much thought to anything else. Now it's optimised and the data is collected...now I have to figure out what to do with the blasted data, and where to go from here.

I guess I just feel really stressed, and I have a horrible tendency to shut down and literally do nothing when I feel this way. I am really going to have to power through this feeling and work through my doubts.

I have a second committee meeting at the end of March, so we'll see where I am then.