My Life, My Pace

Super Bored Grad Student is working furiously at compiling all of her experimental data into easy to understand graphs for Dr. Happy Surgery Collaborator.  She hopes that doing so will help him see that the data doesn’t support Dr. Grumpy Old Major Professor’s crazy desire to carry on with the pointless project.  However, she has come upon an interesting trend, one that shows that Dr. Grumpy Old Major Professor’s miracle treatment just may be having an effect, just not on the parameter that matters.  She angrily crunches the numbers again and then one more time because she does not want Dr. Grumpy Old Major Professor to be right for the wrong reason.  But the results do not lie.  Dr. Grumpy Old Major Professor’s miracle treatment was in fact doing something.  And that’s all that can be said—it’s doing something…what, no one knows.  Good or bad?  No one knows.  The fact remains though, that these results mean that it’s not quite time yet to abandon the pointless project.  And Super Bored Grad Student doesn’t mind being wrong.  What she does mind is the fact that Dr. Grumpy Old Major Professor tried to bully her into blindly following him without anything whatsoever to justify why he wanted to continue.  He never saw the data.  And he wasn’t there for the experiment.  So why did he want her to carry on?  Just because he said so.  And it sure sucks for her that her results ended up justifying his desire to carry on, but that’s just the way things are going for her these days…