Finals Week (or Wordless Wednesday)

Today was the official start date of finals at my school.  Got home from work at 5:30 PM.

Prepared for finals by cleaning my desk off.

   

Presentation Thursday, final exam Friday. Homework due next week Tuesday.

Workstation setup.

Time to get to work.

Dead Grandmothers

It's no secret that a student claiming a grandmother has perished close to midterms, finals, or the due date of a very large project has a high percentage of being made up.  Numerous people have written about this phenomena before; they're typically professors who have had the excuses given to them.  I happened to enter my college years with two grandmothers and graduate with none.  In fact, I had four close family deaths while I was in school but none of my professors questioned me when I said I was going to be out of town.  

My first grandmother died while I was a junior.  It was after midterms and rather sudden, but she was 96 years old.  The next grandmother died my senior year during a really busy time of the term.  Later that spring my surrogate mother for a summer passed away very unexpectedly and it was a rough couple of weeks.  And it was during my fifth year (year two of masters) that my cousin died.  Hers was the only funeral that I could not attend because it was short notice and during the middle of the week.  My professors never asked me for documentation (though I could have easily provided it) and were very kind to me during those rough patches.

One of my grandmothers and my cousin.

The reason I'm bringing this up?  Next week is finals week.  My boyfriend's grandmother has been in a very critical condition since last Saturday and it's not looking good.  My boyfriend and I have been together long enough where I've seen this grandmother practically every holiday.  While I'd love to think there is going to be a happy ending and his grandmother will get better, no one is holding out much hope.  I'm just hoping that if it is a sad ending these professors will be as understanding as the ones at my old school.

Hectic Day

In one of my recent posts I mentioned that I respond well to bribery, especially in the form of cookies. I probably should have mentioned in that post that all the students in the lab received cookies shortly before our advisor flew to Mexico for a week.

The cookies were the incentive to keep our microbes live and well, not to mention have a bunch of stuff ready to share in the weekly meeting. My weekly meeting occurs every Tuesday afternoon for an hour. It takes the full hour because I either have an experiment that goes really well (which gets my advisor very excited about what I can publish) or one that goes really poorly (which confuses my advisor and causes us to spend significant time troubleshooting the problem).

My advisor came back yesterday. Regularly scheduled meeting was today.

I have two different experiments running right now: one is doing great, the other not so much. The two experiments, combined with the fact that I was out of town since last Friday and didn't get a chance to assemble my data over the weekend like I normally do (I got back in town last night at 11:30), meant that I was frantically sitting in the lab all morning trying to put together information to show my advisor. I finished just in the nick of time by looking through my lab notebook during class and skipping breakfast & lunch.

The hectic pace of earlier today has left me feeling unmotivated to continue working on a take-home midterm I have due Thursday. I must pull myself together! While I'd love for this midterm to complete itself I doubt it will happen.