Calm Before the Storm?

If this is the calm before the storm...I'm going to need a bigger boat.

As I have explained to many a family member, graduate students do not take summer vacations. I pay tutition, I come to school, I do my research, I sit outside in the sun and procrastinate. Now, as the title suggests, my blog is about me and my decision to fast track through my Master's degree after one year of course work to a PhD starting in September. I'm pursuing a degree at a Canadian University in Kinesiology, a science that looks at the way we move. As posts continue, I'll go into the trials and tribulations of fast tracking. But for now...its August.

When I first decided to fast track in April, I thought that I would be able to relax this summer. Not in the "I'm going to do nothing this summer" way. I had no pressure to have a thesis proposal finished by the end of the summer. As a fast tracker I am not required to do a Masters thesis. So, my supervisor suggested that I take the summer to learn. Easy enough.

In hindsight, I think I took the whole learning thing to an extreme. In talking to him a few weeks ago, we listed off everything that I was doing this summer - processing an incredibly large data set from a past student, running my own ultrasound study, a tech note collaboration study with a colleague, and helping out a Master's student finish her thesis collection. Sounds busy enough. But factor in everything I needed to do for each of these:

Study 1 - I had never really used the processing software and was completely unfamiliar with the literature and the measures involved
Study 2 - taught myself ultrasound techniques and motion capture system ( you know...like the ones you see the athletes wearing when making sport video games) that involves a ton of front end work
Study 3 - I knew very little about some of the techniques coming into this study, but my work in study two helped me get involved in study 3
Study 4 - Same motion capture system in study 2, but used in a completely different set up that I needed to learn

I think there is one more. Each study has sub studies and well...you get my point. Its now mid august and I'm overwhelmed with work! The tricky thing is that for a such as myself is that despite speeding up a year, I lost a year for publications. So I could potentially have atleast 3-4 papers coming from all this research. And for a young research such as myself, who has two first author papers to her name from undergraduate work, this is gold. But I'm exhausted. So like I said...if this is the calm before the storm, I am going to need a bigger boat.

Granted, I do enjoy the work even if I am pulling my hair out as a result. I believe its worse than I would have expected in the beginning of the summer since mastering any technique always takes way longer than you orignally planned. I have also run into major problems in each of the studies, which has involved an incredible amount of trouble shooting. In the end, I learned way more than I had even imagined possible when I began.

The moral of this summer is that writing a proposal would have been the easy thing to do. Concentrating on one study, not even an entire study, would have been a breeze. But I wouldn't have even begun to learn anything that I learned this summer, even through pilot data. In the end, hands on experience trumps anything you read in a journal article. Some may say I lost a year, but I can easily say I fit a years worth of work into one summer. I would also like to run into these simple start of problems now instead of two years in my PhD after I have already done my proposal. And, I have learned early on, that sometimes its just not possible to do EVERYTHING at once.

So I have three more weeks until I begin. That being said...my vacation can't arrive fast enough!