Tales from the Steppes

2005-02-22

12:44 a.m.
Take all of your big plans and break'em, this is bound to be a while

Today was an, erm, interesting day. I had to present my recent thesis work to both my first and second and had spent the entire weekend prepping for it (except for the candletude.) I guess "present" is not the right word for the process. In reality, what commonly happens is you try to talk about what you have been doing and show some graphics and then the assembled professors explain that you have not done much work, you are misguided in your thinking and this really just won't do. If you are lucky, they won't get personal about it.

So I was really quite prepared to have my drawings ripped into and be told that I had not produced enough work. Instead, I was rather pleasantly told that the figure-ground I had spent hours and freaking hours on was really "quite good." (A figure-ground involves tracing the outlines of all the buildings and then coloring them black. A long and tedious process, especially when your site is 350 acres and has close to a thousand houses on it.)

Of course, this was right after I found out that the Internal Review Board meets tomorrow and my material was due 3 weeks ago. Conveniently, that is 2 weeks before I even heard of the IRB, let alone knew I was going to have to deal with them. The next date they meet on is in late April. My thesis is due April 11.

There is nothing like the feeling of your research, that you have planned for months, going down in flames. I am really trying to be charitable here but my department really screwed me over. Inadvertently, yes. No one did this on purpose and I am certainly not angry. Well, not exactly angry. I suspect when I am less tired and realize how much work just went down the drain, I might be a bit peeved.

So we talked about alternative scenarios. My first suggested I interview children that use specific spaces and bring the scale down. My second suggested I select four children I know and live in a discrete area of the neighborhood and interview them. I am not sure how either of these two suggestions get around the need to go through the IRB. Maybe I am just being stupid but it seems to me that the ethics of the situation are much more questionable when the sample is not random. I am still doing research on human subjects, which is the entire point of the IRB. Quite frankly, these approaches also seem half-assed. If I am going to do the research, I am going to do it right and not have a product that I am embarassed about.

I came up with an idea that would let me produce a design-oriented terminal project instead of a thesis, like everyone else. This was rejected, even though it was reasonably ambitious. So now I have been given a deadline of Thursday noon to develop a new research proposal. Hopefully I can use some of the objective data and analysis I have already completed.

I wish I could say I am hopeful and looking forward to the challenge I have been given. Maybe tomorrow. All I can think about right now is John Belushi with his mouth full of mashed potatoes in Animal House (I'm a zit, get it?) Because that is what my head feels like.