At 2pm: Colin has his committee meeting, where he presents all of his current data to his board members, answers their questions, and receives feedback and "ideas" about his dissertation. His advisor and one of his board members are here at UNC and so they will attend in person, but two of the board members are back at his school in Houston. So a video conference to Houston has to be set up--also his responsibility today.
Apparently, not all faculty are as nurturing and supportive as mine have been. From what Colin tells me, it sounds as though professors of science make it a point to grill their graduate students as hard as they can to make sure they know what they're talking about.
Colin has been working on this presentation for several weeks now. We spent this past "holiday weekend" in his lab building--him at his desk working on his "figures," which is what they call confocal microscope images--and me a few floors below, studying for my boards.
After today, if all goes well, plenty of stress will be lifted from his shoulders. Of course, then he'll start working full-force on a "first author" paper which his advisor would like turned in by the end of July to be published. I never realized that the order of authors' names in scientific journal articles matter.
The first author listed in a scientific journal article is the one primarily responsible for the data collection, analysis, and writing of the paper. The last author is the Primary Investigator, or PI, in the lab where the data is collected and analyzed (in this case, Colin's advisor). This is the person who decides what research is being done, who consents to, changes, or rejects ideas of everyone working in the lab, and who ultimately has to answer to the NIH about what goes on in the lab.
The authors in between the first and last authors are other people working in the lab--also under the PI--who indirectly contribute by the work that they all do as a team, but do not necessarily contribute specifically to the writing of that paper.
Interesting....
Please keep him in your prayers today.
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2 comments:
We'll be praying...good luck Colin.
He did "okay," according to self-report. But when I probed, he said that the questions weren't too grilling, and they gave him some good ideas. So I think that's great! Apparently the set-up was sub-optimal: the board members in TX could see his slides but couldn't see him--so instead of pointing to things, he had to describe where they were on each slide, which was awkward. He said he was a little flustered in the begining, even with his self-prescribed 100 push-ups before any public speaking.... So from all this I gather that it wasn't PERFECT. But it went fine, and now it's over. Thank God, and thanks so much for the prayers!
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