Committee review

Odd screen getting to here. Wonder what blogger is changing?

Anyway,

This last few months I have been trying to get my stuff published from my masters. It has been a nightmare. First of all, my committee there is slower than the development of dirt in getting edited drafts back to me. Then, they have all the original data: lab notebooks, databases, etc. But they can't find anything in it. So I have summaries and batch text files. These I try to peice together to answer questions I never got while I was there because they NEVER paid much attention I guess.

This is the thing that bugs me. When I wrote my thesis. These were the comments, "Best thesis I ever read. Minor changes only." "Why did you use these sequences in the alignment and not others?"

Answer: "Because they were the best sequences, ie fewest unkowns, longest, etc. "

Response: "Oh"

No one once questioned the length of my sequencing reads, the quality of library construction, the scoring of the SSR gels, the development of the primers, etc etc. Now, TWO years later, suddenly, there are problems with all of it.

I am willing to admit I did not due it all right, but at the time I presented the exact same data, the same procedures, the same results, the same methods, the same conclusions, and they were the "Best thesis I ever read." Now they are not.

I suspect they didn't even bother to read the original thesis when I wrote it. They just assumed everything was fine, which is dumb, because I could have fixed problems at that point. Now it just makes me look like a bad researcher.