Monday, August 4, 2008

This Last Weekend

The last three days have probably been the busiest of my summer vacation. All summer, I have been working on this paper, which my collaborators and I are hoping will get accepted in an upcoming journal issue. The project was part of my senior thesis and my adviser was of the impression that with a little more work, there was a chance that we could get the work published. The "little more work" has turned out be a whole summer worth of re-analyzing and re-evaluating the data. My collaborators in this have been my adviser and a former student of my adviser, who is just finishing his PhD at a different school. Due to the distance between the graduate student's school and my school, a lot of the collaboration has had to be done by e- mail. It was not until this last weekend that I finally got to meet him.
I had known about the meeting for a while, and while I was excited to finally have all of us in one room, it was a bit intimidating since I was fully aware of my standing in the academic hierarchy. The meeting ended up been a six-hour marathon and I found myself having to defend my analysis and conclusions with concrete data and references. My adviser and the graduate student were very supportive though, and since I will have done the bulk of the work by the time we submit the paper to be refereed, it was agreed that I should take first author.
Other than that, I start my packing this week and I can promise you right now, I am not too excited about all the junk I have to go through.

2 comments:

Di Di said...

It's great that you are already working on a paper like this, and especially good that you will (rightfully) be first author. I actually just dealt with a very messy conflict over authorship, so I can appreciate the value of what these people are doing in acknowledging that the junior person deserves the most credit in this case. You're lucky that you got to work with them as you launch your academic career.

gridlock said...

Thanks Di Di. I was not really expecting to get first authorship on this one, even though my adviser gave me free rein from the beginning and I have almost two years invested in it. If the reviewers don’t rip it apart, it will be nice to have my name in a peer-reviewed journal paper