Honors thesis taking way too long

[NikkiFSU]

I don't know if anyone can relate but I really hate it that a tiny flaw in an experiment causes weeks/months of lost time. I started my thesis the summer before jr. year but my project was just not going to happen (the idiot who sent us the "transgenic" mice I was using sent us regular wildtype animals). It took like 6 months to figure out what was going on and for my professor to get him to admit he screwed up. Then I had to start a whole new project, learning new techniques from a new post-doc from abroad but that took forever b/c it was impossible to understand his attempts at english. Then the nazi histologist in the dept. wouldn't share the cryostat, then applications took over my life...and a few weeks ago I realized half of my work was useless because something weird happened to those tissue sections I gave up my Xmas break to cut, and it affected the reporter gene I needed.

Has anyone else encountered problems like this? It sucks... I'm supposed to graduate in 3 months but am constrained by the time it takes to breed the mice for offspring and how fertile they are. So...I was thinking of just staying to finish for the first summer session (6 weeks) so I can still write a decent thesis after doing all this work BUT my degree would be granted and dated at the end of the full summer term in early August. I know schools want transcripts after you finish but was hoping that if I can't provide it until right before classes start at best (I have no idea when med school classes start or where I'm going yet) that it wouldn't be a problem. I think the MSAR mentioned every school requires a bachelor's and I don't know what their policies are or if you have to document all this by a certain date to be in the class, etc. I just don't want to get screwed into taking a year off or not being able to go anymore due to this. What would you guys do and has anyone been in this predicament where they postponed graduating until the summer for some reason or another? It really sucks b/c my thesis credit is my waiver out of some stupid experimental biology class and if I didn't go through finishing, Idk if they would try to screw me out of graduating...

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[madonna]

I don't know if anyone can relate but I really hate it that a tiny flaw in an experiment causes weeks/months of lost time. I started my thesis the summer before jr. year but my project was just not going to happen (the idiot who sent us the "transgenic" mice I was using sent us regular wildtype animals). It took like 6 months to figure out what was going on and for my professor to get him to admit he screwed up. Then I had to start a whole new project, learning new techniques from a new post-doc from abroad but that took forever b/c it was impossible to understand his attempts at english. Then the nazi histologist in the dept. wouldn't share the cryostat, then applications took over my life...and a few weeks ago I realized half of my work was useless because something weird happened to those tissue sections I gave up my Xmas break to cut, and it affected the reporter gene I needed.

Has anyone else encountered problems like this? It sucks... I'm supposed to graduate in 3 months but am constrained by the time it takes to breed the mice for offspring and how fertile they are. So...I was thinking of just staying to finish for the first summer session (6 weeks) so I can still write a decent thesis after doing all this work BUT my degree would be granted and dated at the end of the full summer term in early August. I know schools want transcripts after you finish but was hoping that if I can't provide it until right before classes start at best (I have no idea when med school classes start or where I'm going yet) that it wouldn't be a problem. I think the MSAR mentioned every school requires a bachelor's and I don't know what their policies are or if you have to document all this by a certain date to be in the class, etc. I just don't want to get screwed into taking a year off or not being able to go anymore due to this. What would you guys do and has anyone been in this predicament where they postponed graduating until the summer for some reason or another? It really sucks b/c my thesis credit is my waiver out of some stupid experimental biology class and if I didn't go through finishing, Idk if they would try to screw me out of graduating...

i think that as long as your transcript is dated before first day of school there should be no problem. just contact the schools and ask to be sure
good luck with your project

 

[jebus]

Some med schools allow you to defer admission for a year to pursue an interest such as research. If you are admitted anywhere maybe you should look into that. Or, depending on how rigorous your PI is, go the Woo-Suk Hwang route.

 

[C.P. Jones]

Some med schools allow you to defer admission for a year to pursue an interest such as research. If you are admitted anywhere maybe you should look into that. Or, depending on how rigorous your PI is, go the Woo-Suk Hwang route.

deferring admission is not something i would do for an honor's thesis....you can write an honor's thesis on a failed project

that whole woo-suk thing was funny...he's like my lab hero...maybe not anymore

 

[NikkiFSU]

deferring admission is not something i would do for an honor's thesis....you can write an honor's thesis on a failed project

that whole woo-suk thing was funny...he's like my lab hero...maybe not anymore

Okay so I can write it up like a lab report "Well we didn't get anything right but this is why"....lol. I was under the impression that w/o enough data my stuff was worthless and I couldn't defend it and therefore couldn't get the credits. I wouldl def. not defer for a thesis lol! I am just trying to make sure I get something out of my work and get the class it is subsituting for that I need to graduate and don't mind staying an extra 4 weeks. But have any of you guys felt like you put a ton of work into your lab to get no publications or not enough rewards bc of something going wrong? Everyday I start to hate research more and am just waiting for an interviewer to ask "Why not academic medicine" because I will fall out of my chair

 

[jebus]

But have any of you guys felt like you put a ton of work into your lab to get no publications or not enough rewards bc of something going wrong?

I was transfecting 293 cells to do some pull-down assays to show protein interactions in a ligand dependent manner. We found not only the ligand dependence but also the residues that interacted. The PI figured we needed one more figure to publish a paper; we sent an abstract to a good journal. I had been working on this project for about 6 months for about 30 hours a week as an undergrad. The post-doc I was working with mixed up 2 plasmid preps when I was out of town. By then I had graduated and was working full time. I spent months trying to get the experiment to work again and we couldn't get it to work. Finally we had to make another plasmid prep so I did it - and I found out he mixed them up. Our transfections had been totally messed up for months. It was now about 10 months that I spent working on this project.
I quit. It's been about 3 years since then and that project still hasn't been published. I got fcuked because of the post-doc's ineptitude. I think he's only been published once since then which is something of an disgrace because the PI is an HHMI investigator and member of the National Academy of Sciences....

 

[ashabee4]

I am in the process of writing a thesis right now as well. Actually, I haven't even started writing it. I am also working with transgenic mice and feel your pain about how long the process can take. With one semester left, I have giant hurdles to jump in order to get significant results and feel like the majority of my research time was spent tinkering with the details of protocols and figuring out what went wrong with experiements. Biology/chemistry research projects are often slow-going, however. Writing a thesis based on whatever you have at the end of the semester should suffice. I'm going to try to accomplish all that I can in the coming months, but come graduation day, I won't give my project another thought. Do not extend your project into the summer just because your project didn't progress as planned. That is expected to happen, and you should be moving on to the next stage of your life (and take some time inbetween to relax!). Good luck writing the actual thesis. I am not looking forward to that part of the project, as I suspect it will be even more slow-going and tedious than the actual research!

 

[C.P. Jones]

Okay so I can write it up like a lab report "Well we didn't get anything right but this is why"....lol. I was under the impression that w/o enough data my stuff was worthless and I couldn't defend it and therefore couldn't get the credits. I wouldl def. not defer for a thesis lol! I am just trying to make sure I get something out of my work and get the class it is subsituting for that I need to graduate and don't mind staying an extra 4 weeks. But have any of you guys felt like you put a ton of work into your lab to get no publications or not enough rewards bc of something going wrong? Everyday I start to hate research more and am just waiting for an interviewer to ask "Why not academic medicine" because I will fall out of my chair

obviously i don't know if your school has strict regulations on an honor's thesis, but i wrote mine on a project i had been working on for a year and half....basically no results...and as far as i know, there are still no results...anyway, i wrote it on what i had, with a very long intro to make up for it

remember that if you get a chance to look at thesis that ppl from non-science majors have done, you will see some that are half the length of what you may be expecting to write. i knew one person that did a thesis on a survey...A SURVEY, so your honor's office i hope wouldn't care much...hopefully your PI understands that it's not as big of a deal and that the reason for honor's programs to do this is more to give you the experience of the research and thesis. of course, if your project works that would be so much better!

do you actually have to defend your thesis as a phd student would? we literally just had to write one and hand it in (of course my PI made me correct it many times even after graduation). if you wanted to wait a little after you grad to write it....see if your honor's office will give you an extenstion. they gave me a short extension since i was almost done w/ it, and so they still gave me the honor's scholar designation at graduation

i do know how you feel about doing so much work and getting nothing out of it though...it really sucks.

g/l w/ all of this

 

[NikkiFSU]

Yeah I thought everyone had to defend it? I have to write it still, but we defend it to our committee of our PI and 2-3 others, then whoever else happens to go, I guess. The honors student before me presented at the university symposium so I might do that since I bet my PI will encourage it and there were only like 20 ppl when I saw hers so it wasnt like a huge deal. My PI is also trying to get us to go to a student-run meeting SENN (southeast nerve net)- hey a reason to travel to atlanta and party it up If it wasn't for going to society for neuroscience for the stuff I did at U of R, I would never have gotten to party on Bourbon street before Katrina wiped that area off the map The actual writing won't be a big deal....more of the analysis and data collection and trying to come up with a why? and how?

Desiredusername- that SUCKS. One of the grad students in my lab does that same type of work to study ion channel/synaptic physiology and transfects with all different mutants and patches them. All I ever did was split cell cultures....seeing what he goes through patching alone can give me a nervous breakdown. What is a pull-down assay....were you just precipitating out the interacting ligand/receptor? Do you do Westerns and SDS-PAGE? It sounds like you were doing a lot of similar techniques that our grad student does and it is REAL easy to forget a minor detail and butcher everything when you're doing that kind of work. But that doesn't matter when you have post-docs switching your samples around! I mean come on, as UNDERGRADS we are allowed to make research mistakes and do "foolish" things that cost the lab a lot of money and us a lot of time but by the time you are a post-doc you should have been in the game long enough to not really do that anymore. Some people are just not really good at research and don't understand that they need to take control of their own learning and success and the only way to succeed in academic medicine is to research well, so you can publish well, so you can get lots of grant funding and a tenure track spot so u can even research in the first place. Considering that after this post-doc leaves and their typical time period is a year, and they haven't built a solid career background, I'm surprised that your PI who is associated w/ Hughes isn't sh**ing a brick for ruining your lab's chance to publish and is a negative asset to the lab.

Asha- I understand what you're saying because I have spent SO much time troubleshooting. I was supposed to do a dihybrid cross to combine our ion channel knockout version with the reporter gene knockin version, genotype my ass off to establish a colony purebreeding for both traits, and use them in my project. For a + control I purified DNA from the mice we got from columbia. I practiced genotyping mice of a known genetic background, I think the F1's and I wasn't getting the right results. After months of going over everything, switching reagents one at a time, and having others run it and see if it was consistant I came across the + control gel pic in my lab notebook and for some reason dug up info on the primers and found out that the one band there was actually the WT one. The same lab shared animals with us before and they were fine. Of course they accidentally sent some normal mice from the petstore right when I decide to join the lab
And this whole effort was just to generate the colony of mice I needed to even start my study!
So as you can see, I hate working with them too...they are weirder about breeding and if we get any, the mom sometimes eats the pups. My project now relies on the sexlife of a bunch of mice. What are you doing with your mice and which transgenic mice are they?

I know I definately need a break over the summer but was under the impression I couldn't defend and write about something that may or may not be complete by April. But I guess that is left for the grad students, right? Man, they don't even get their degree when stuff like this happens and they have to stay as long as it takes to make it work, right?


But that IS how it is in Bio & chem research and i am sooooo thankful I did not go into academic medicine, where "the rewards come slow and with great painstaking efforts" (IF THEY COME AT ALL)! I like research, when it works, but doing it all day every day would probably get me institutionalized.

 

[diosa428]

Yeah, I have to write my Master's thesis this semester - it's a one-year extension of the research I did as an undergrad and it results in a thesis. Except that I still don't have THAT much data (a good amount, but still it doesn't seem like much). Working with animals is really difficult! I work with mouse embryos, and they have to be a certain day old, which means I have to set up a breeding for one night only, and then hope the mice get pregnant. Usually 1 out of 4 does. Then, of course, not all of my experiments work. I think my biggest problem is my advisor - she tells me I need a bigger sample size but then comes up with a million other experiments I should do. Since I'm injecting the mice at certain timepoints, and I can only inject them at ONE of the timepoints per litter, it is difficult to collect a sufficient sample size for each timepoint, especially since my professor keeps telling me to do different timepoints! I started out with 4 and now she has me doing 8! Then I have to process the brains, which takes forever.

In a side note, which has nothing to do with research, but is really slowing me down - I'm just sick of being here. There's a reason college is only 4 years, and that's b/c 5 years is TOO LONG. All of my friends have graduated, and it sucks still being here with a bunch of 18 year olds. I find it difficult to make myself sit down and WRITE b/c I just don't have the attention span or the interest anymore. It's even worse now that I've actually been accepted to medical school, b/c I feel like getting a Master's is completely worthless (which it is). Anyway, it feels nice to vent. My friends are coming up this weekend, so maybe that will make me feel better.