I am back

As I have hinted not so subtly before, I have been sick. i had an operation this last week or so, and (fingers crossed) all that is taken care off -- have another post op appointment in a few months to verify that.

In other words: I am back to work and this blog.

And here in lies the struggle -- of all the things that should have happened over the last 12 months of nightmarish health stuff, what do I do first? No, this is a misleading question -- all need to be done, but clearly I should devote different amount of time on the different projects. There is the current project so 100% of my official work time has to go to that. But we all know that we work more than our 40hrs a week schedule. So how do I allocate the time? Spend all that time to get the current project up to speed, because after all it is paying my salary? Spend some of that time on tying up graduate work projects? Or work on the new projects that do not pay my salary but have a higher chance of success, i.e., the papers are in sight?

In graduate school, I always had multiple projects. And I had problems because the new project was always more interesting than tying up loose ends and putting all the sections of the paper together and making the figures publication quality and what not. After all I am driven by curiosity.

Alas, careers are based on what one publishes -- the bits that I find the most unsatisfying. I admit there is a great value in the paper writing process -- it makes me double check that I haven't missed important work, it makes me explain my ideas from scratch again thus double checking for faults and flaws, and it makes me think about the larger picture, and finally down the road it gets me feedback and sometimes new ideas.

So in the past, I could discuss with my Ph.D. adviser and mentors my priorities. I could say I want to do this and this and that but i only have so much time, and get some kind of plan or help with accomplishing all that. In theory I could do the same here, but my postdoc project is vastly different from my other side projects, so I feel guilty for asking for help with stuff my adviser's name won't go on. Especially since my adviser has been incredibly supportive with the little amount of work that has been done over those 12 months. Am I wrong on this issue, and hence discuss it with him? Or ...

Do I need even more so to find another mentor for sanity check? And I don't know how to find one.

In grad school, due to issues with my Ph.D adviser, and due to having taken classes/being a TA, and due to making yearly presentations to the department (that people outside my group found interesting!), I was lucky to find 2 mentors very very easily. The reason I opted for two to run things by was that I didn't want to get too skewed on either the male or the female side; I wanted a balanced gender feedback not the least reason being that a lot of the problems I had were based on sexual harassment by certain faculty.

Here I am struggling. I am in generally a private person, so while I had been open to the facts of being sick and the operation schedule and what not, I don't want to have it define me. On the other hand it is the crux of the issue I think. So more details will have to come out. To make it worse, I have yet to figure out how to talk about it without crying -- not that I want to burst crying, but that my eyes just start crying. Again with my previous mentors who knew my work, I felt I had their respect and could and did ask them to just ignore the tears since they are involuntary.

Anyways, having written the above I decided to bite the bullet. I have looked around and found a faculty member who I think will be level headed and a good mentor. So I emailed her.

Here is me sitting with fingers crossed hoping she will say yes.