For the last obnoxiously high number of months I have been stuck in science purgatory. It has been cutting into my blogging time, in a big way. I somehow managed to get myself caught in the crack between two advisors and my thesis committee.

So here’s what happened. Last May, my committee checked my box (wait…. wait… yep, that’s still funny) on the condition that I generate an HSV-1 with a specific promoter mutation and begin testing it. Straightforward, yes? (Play ominous music here). My committee disbanded as I was not required to meet with them again after completing this work. My lab closed, my advisor moved to Arizona, and I moved into the lab of the head of my committee to finish up. Or so I thought.

Eight months later I still didn’t (and don’t) have the stupid virus made. I mentioned some of the reasons for this earlier. I had no committee, my advisor was (and is) far far away, and my adoptive mentor stood behind the committee’s decision. My advisor (she) and my surrogate advisor (he) are on the same grant and she did not feel comfortable pressuring him to let me go for fear of affecting their future working relationship. I realize I should care about their working relationship but at this point I do not. Not at all. Politics are not my thing.

I was getting desperate. Desperate to finish, desperate to stop beating my head against the same virus rock, desperate to get my light back at the end of the tunnel (melodramatic enough? I think so). At the same time, I was afraid of being perceived as a cheater, as someone who was let off easy because of the circumstances, or of being forever gossiped about as the girl who was allowed to graduate with a weak thesis.

After tossing and turning (while both asleep and awake), whining, stressing, and otherwise despairing for a good long while, I gathered up all my courage and asked my committee to reconvene, with my advisor’s blessing. Highly unorthodox, I realize, but what was I supposed to do? I would rather not celebrate my fiftieth birthday in my lab.

My committee and my advisor (in attendance via conference call) heard me out, said “ooh, that’s complicated” at all the appropriate spots in my experimental plan, and made the most perfect decision I could have hoped for.

As I see it, there were three possible outcomes to this meeting. They could have decided that:

1) I can stop now and write up what I have, in which case I would have felt a like a cheater, permitted to graduate with a substandard amount of data.

2) I cannot graduate until I fulfill the original requirements, in which case I would have quit on the spot and never looked back.

3) I should work up until a hard deadline (January 31), at which time I can write and graduate, no matter how much (or how little, in my case) I accomplish.

Happily, they decided on option 3. I will work hard to make this expletive virus until January 31, then quit all lab work, write up my thesis, buy a pretty outfit, defend, walk in a crimson gown, and get on with the rest of my life. This I can live with. Uncertainly and lack of direction, not so much. Besides, Jews don’t believe in purgatory.