Good morning, everyone. A lot has happened since I last wrote. Somehow, we have reached the point where my thesis deadline is in NINE DAYS. It is an honest to god thrill to think that the end is in sight! I still have a lot of writing to do, but I think I have passed the hardest part. It’s like I am now standing on top of the mountain and realizing I now have to descend. I had a really positive meeting with my Wellesley advisor yesterday and I am surprisingly on track with the whole thing. Plus, he may have referred to my figures as “beautiful”. Guys, this thing, the product of practically the past year of my life, is actually going to get done.
It took a lot to get to this point, which is why I have been so MIA recently. Only a couple days ago, I was in full on panic mode that…what if my data couldn’t prove what I want it to prove? Or, even worse, what if my data did prove what I wanted it to prove but I just simply couldn’t interpret it properly? While I’ve spent a good portion of my college career overcoming my aversion to math via constant practice, statistics has never exactly been my strong suit. And we are not just talking about simple stuff here. I had to teach myself the entire field of nonparametric statistics in a matter of days. I have a color coded excel spreadsheet that has so many columns it can no longer use just one letter to label them. I made six figures, and many of them have six parts.
It took an email from my boss all the way from Japan to resolve some of this confusion, but boy am I glad I asked for help. I removed all the outliers from the data set, and there it was: the data I could use to draw the conclusion we hypothesized we would find all along. It was the scientific equivalent of a mic-drop moment, at least for yours truly. It was now 10:30pm on a Sunday night in Clapp Library, and I had been working on the thesis relatively uninterrupted since noon. I realized, in that moment, that I had cracked my thesis before it cracked me. And, boy did it feel good. I am smiling to myself now just thinking about it. I literally skipped back home to Stone Davis…and it was snowing in April.
Now, I still have a lot of writing to do, but writing…that I can manage. The thinking-intensive data analysis is finally done, and now it’s just the story-telling that’s left, my favorite part. I know realistically that most of the next nine days will be spent in a library cubicle. But the end is in sight! There is a light at the end of the aldosterone biosynthesis pathway!
Ever lovely yours,
Eleanor
I also hiked a literal mountain last weekend, the only time I have not been thinking about my thesis. And here is a view from the top, an apt metaphor