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china town SF

I will not work on my figure. I will not read 12 Books. I will not start, finish or work on 12 projects. I will not excercise more, unless I do. I will not stop smoking. I will not do any of those many things that get resolved on for the new year on new years eve.

I have only one goal, finishing my PhD.

I started in September 2006, full of motivation and excitement. With the years the motivation receeded and the excitment was replaced with a kind of stoic bearing of things to be, as one experiment after another failed and the file with successful experiments stayed dismaly empty. That a long relationship ended during that time certainly didn’t improve the process.

That the end is now in sight came about differently than expected.From all those blogging women in science I knew, that I needed to know for myself when enough is enough and that I would know from a desperate desire to leave. Still I expected my boss to tell me to think about finishing. Instead I have been preparing him since last summer for accepting that I will only finish projects and not start new ones anymore. As I wrote in November I wrote my exposé for my thesis an gave it to him. He was surprised and couldn’t settle for encouraging me or slowing me down. I thought it was just as well to stick with my plan and got some hints from him how to rewrite the exposé

Now I am sitting here and at the end of June I want to hand in my thesis so I can take the exam in July and suddenly there is a shortage of time. thats why everything needs to take a backseat, from politics to creativeness. But it is hard to concentrate and not stick my head into the sand. It is difficult to get used to this feeling of closing and finishing. This being drilled through the years is still saying, try this, try that. But I will stop listening to it. I need to go and and ask for a lot of favors, help with measurments and interpretation of data, an also to go and just write the work.

That I can’t totally let myself go to reach that goal is also clear, I have to be balanced, I need to eat well and exercise, but I will not force behaviours and I will not enter into any engagements and those that are inconvenient will be canceld. For Blogging that means you can’t count on any regularity. If I feel like it or if I am inspired I will write, probably also if I need to vent. And I will gladly accept your encouragements in that case.

Nach der (erfolgreichen) Beendigung der Doktorarbeit werde ich dann weiter sehen, was wird sich ergeben, was wird passieren, wo werde ich hingehen und so weiter. Vielleicht ergeben sich ja dann ein paar Neujahrsvorsätze.

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