Doing it in the Field

So I just got off the phone with my advisor. I'm convinced that this guy is like the best advisor, ever. Not only do I not have any of the horror stories that you hear about (or see at times), but the guy is just upbeat about things, even when I botch things.

So yesterday, I found out from my advisor that I had screwed up my latest draft of a manuscript that we're working on. Basically, we were using "track changes" in Word, and I hadn't been accepting changes when I was working on parts. Basically, we never talked about it, so I figured that as I made adjustments, that he'd accept the changes. It never occured to me that since I was a co-author, that I also had the authority (and responsibility) to accept his changes, as well. So, I hadn't been doing that, and I got myself confused with our revisions. Basically, I ended up working on an old draft, which made him duplicate some work. I flew through the stages, going from depression, to acceptance, to anger very quickly, but my advisor was just so upbeat about it. He just said, "Here's the latest version. Incorporate what you put into the previous version, and we'll get it taken care of."

I mean, I was pissed off at myself, but during our conversation, my advisor put a lot of things in perspective for me. It doesn't really feel like you're doing a whole lot day-to-day (really, because I'm not, I think), but if you take a step back, it looks a lot nicer. At the start of the summer, we were 80% ready to go with a single journal submission. Currently, halfway through summer, we are 98% with the previous journal submission, about 80% with the latest one, plus we had presented our work at a good conference. This makes for a pretty productive summer, even though it feels like I haven't really done anything (which, I really haven't).

So, today, I get a call when I'm off at Panera getting some work in. He had just gotten off the phone with a gal from the Extension office. Basically, we were planning on introducing some new educational materials into their EFNEP curriculum, and then test the results of their old materials compared to our new materials. Somehow, this didn't work out well last fall, so we didn't end up getting the data that we wanted. So, we were going to set this up for this summer. But while we were reviewing their materials, we had noticed that there was a pretty big change in their materials from when we had first talked to them. Basically, they ended up incorporating a lot of our philosophies and suggestions into their materials. So, we can't really do what we were planning, since they had sort of stolen our punchline. But, really, as you take a step back, it just means that they took our advice, and just ran with it. Which is pretty awesome, really. This means that the work that I've been doing has been put into play at a statewide level by a program that probably serves 10,000 - 20,000 people at a given time. And what's nice is that we can just make our data look like a longitudinal study, where we compare the results from 2 years ago (when they were using old materials) to this coming year (which will use new materials that is modeled after what we had proposed). Same result, different way of telling the story. And more importantly, it gets our recent research actually out into the real world.

So, it's nice. It seems that this stuff that I do makes a difference, even if it's just a little bit at a time.

To close, I have an opinion question to throw out there. I think that the last two phone numbers that I've added to my phone are from vegetarians. Check that. Two of the last three. How long do you guys think that I could hang out with a vegetarian chick? Certain things I don't put up with. Like cats. But I've never really known any vegetarians, so I don't know what to think.

-Chairman