On the Road to a PhD: One of those good moments

Last night, I had a chat with an older woman at the library, who seems to have adopted me as her granddaughter. She started her PhD, which was in the Philosophy of Learning, in her 50's. We were talking about how hard it is to get through a PhD and the ups and downs of the journey. Hers is actually undefended for a slew of unfortunate reasons. Anyways, I was talking about how lately it has been an uphill battle, just making it through day to day. It's been almost 3 months of it. And she said, well, you know your're doing the right thing if at least part of the time you doubt yourself and think what the hell am I doing? But there are always going to be those moments when you know you are doing the right thing. When you are so consumed in your research because you love it or, when you discover something, read something or figure something out that you have been working on.

Today was (sadly) the second time that has happened in 3 months, but at least it happened. I have been working on the data analysis for my recruitment project (the data I collected throughout the fall). Today after hours of fiddling with the spreadsheet, ratios, log transforming variables, double checking all my data and addition, came that gut-wrenching moment when you put the data in to run your tests. First I had plotted the scatterplot and after that I knew. I could tell it was obviously a negative trend, I could even see it was significant. What are the chances? Obviously, I spent the next few hours trying to figure out if I somehow screwed this up, but I don't think I did. It's real. Pretty crazy, smaller plants are recruiting more offspring for the future generations than larger plants are, relative to other species. Makes me excited to get my MSc written up and submitted for publication.

I have lots of more work to do, and now 5 project ideas to develop, package together nicely, and decide what my proposal will focus on, and what parts of my project can be completed as an undergraduate thesis and then collaborated with for my dissertation.