Waiting game

So I turned in my written comprehensive exam almost exactly 1 month ago. I have yet to hear anything back about it because something happened with one of my committee members. Supposedly, they’re meeting next week to discuss it and I’ll get the verdict then. So I’m either going to out-right fail or be asked to make revisions/finish. I did not hit my 100 page mark — not even close, really. I think my grand total was around 70, and the last few pages are all kind of terrible because I didn’t get a chance to really integrate what I wanted with them… Soooo we’ll see. Needless to say, I’ve just been a little bit anxious about that. But this week I was able to be relatively calm about that.

My birthday was Monday. Nothing too exciting happened — my brain decided to kick it off with me having a dream about having some terminal disease, so that sort of put me in a funk. I bought myself a bike with some money from my parents and a giftcard I got for Christmas — once I can actually buy a backpack I’ll start riding to school. Well, at least until the heat becomes unbearable. I went out to dinner with a bunch of friends that night and we all came back to my place and had cake. So nothing too exciting, but it was a nice day.

Oh! I found out  I won a travel award to a conference in Puerto Rico this year, so that’s pretty exciting. What is my boss more excited about? The fact that I was invited to give a talk on my research. Me? I’ll probably pee myself out of nervousness, on stage. Hopefully my experiments in the next couple months actually work out so i have something a little more exciting to talk about. At this point all I have is the data I presented at my last conference, but  I suppose that was good enough to get me an award. Terrifying, really. I think the most ridiculous part is that I threw this study together so haphazardly that I can’t actually believe the results. But whatever. The undergrad went through and recounted everything and we had similar results. So yay? It would be nice if I could stop constantly questioning myself. Any time anything works I feel like I should repeat it 8 million times because I feel like I must’ve done something wrong.

I’ve been writing a grant for the last two weeks and I’ve come to realize that I actually have no idea how to write a grant. So getting feedback about that should be fun. I’m pretty sure my boss thinks that I have no idea what I’m doing 50% of the time. I’ll just appreciate the fact that she’s happy about the travel award and the fact that I’m submitting 2 papers in the first month of the year. Fingers crossed they get published.

For now I guess I’ll go back to being neurotic in waiting for my exams to come back. Maybe once this whole comprehensive thing is over with I can stop feeling like my life is going to end on a daily basis. Or crying at random times. Or, you know, have some semblance of happiness in my life. Or maybe this is just how I’m going to feel until I graduate. Whenever the fuck that is.