Uncorrected Proof
Epic meeting with my advisor today. He set up a regular weekly meeting with all his grad students, and I’m the lucky kid with the first meeting slot. I thought this might make him less strung out than getting him later in line, but no. As I should have expected, he had already bumped the meeting after me, and I was bookended by non-regular meetings which appeared to be a bit intense. I do feel bad for the guy, but I guess when you’re hard to get a hold of, or are prone to forgetting required things, angry meetings do tend to crop up when you can be found.
Anyway, I did get my full hour meeting, and we talked over my research proposal. Last night I dreamed that he was really disappointed with it and found it unprofessional and not the quality of work one would expect from a graduate student. Today didn’t go as poorly as all that, though he wasn’t real excited about it either. I think that’s his professional face, and I took it pretty well. He made some changes to it that I am thankful for, like shortening the overall length and breadth of the experiment, and we hacked off even a good portion of the critical stuff. So it will be a small, pilot-y type study, but it will give me the opportunity to do something quickly, without staking too much of my life on it. And in the end, he thinks that we’ll still get a paper out of it, so what more could I want? I get my free fMRI experience, and hopefully a publication.
The more interesting part of our meeting was the non-QP stuff. Turns out all the leading questions he was asking me about the decisions I made in my proposal was so he could feel me out for a different plan. He’s cooking up some sort of holy trinity of researchers and wants me to be the dedicated monkey/grad student for the project. It’s entirely nebulous as of yet, but it involves liasioning with all three of the language researchers at the CMB and doing something that combines my strengths – sublexical phonology – with theirs (sign, music, fMRI). It’s a huge undertaking, a thesis-level project for sure, and definitely more like the primordial soup which precedes creation than a tangible and easily managed plan. On the other hand, what better beginnings are there for ones PhD topic than your advisor waxing poetic about the clouds you could reach for and asking you if you would be the monkey/Moses to make something out of it.
To pat my own back here, I feel I must mention that he described me as someone comfortable working in a broad network of seemingly unrelated things and that I was able to think creatively and outside-the-box about things, and this is why he thought I would be the person to lead this effort. It’s not at the zenith of complements, but coming from my awkward advisor, it was really nice to hear he thought well of me and had been thinking about my future. Next up is a meeting with these three brains, and it’s going to be quite a trick to keep myself grounded in the fact that I know some things these researchers don’t, and have (am) the manpower they need, without feeling like I’m an inferior member of the group because they’re all brilliant tenured lab managers, and I’m just a dopey grad student unfamiliar with their work.
All-in-all, a very successful but grounded day for me. And productive to boot!