So here is a little thread about a fish tank.
Here is two of the inhabitants of said fish tank.
A flower anemone front on the rock and an elegance coral in the back of the picture.
@aetris not black light. The coral does have fluorescent coloring but in this photo it’s under a wavelength of bulb that brings out the color. About 400nm to 450nm
@Kyeh let’s see there is a yellow tang, blue tang, sail tang, 4 clownfish, two Goby a skunk cleaner shrimp, a three stripe damsel, a domino damsel, a peppermint shrimp, a clown tang, a blue mouth trigger and some other corals. Tomorrow brings some more coral and Wednesday I get some interesting invertebrates. I’ll post some more pictures this week.
@bleedmichigan@mike808 If he had it under regular lighting instead of the super-blue (actinic) lighting, the tips would appear gold. The blue light brings out the more neon colors and washes out the rest. In my tank, I have a coral that looks brown under regular lighting but neon orange under actinic lighting.
@mike808@Weboh actually even under actinic in real life the tips look gold. The picture just doesn’t work. Here is a picture looking down from the store with a better camera and no glass in the way. Same exact coral piece.
@bleedmichigan Hopefully you have enough hair algae to feed it. I’ve been through a few and they usually die out shortly after the hair algae is gone. They can eat some caulerpa and the stuff that grows on the glass, but the main part of their diet needs to be hair algae.
@Weboh I have some hair algae but in my last tank I had great success feeding red micro algae to my sea hare. Then I moved and sold the tank. So I have a refugium full of red macro so I hopefully will be good to go.
Hi there @bleedmichigan How’s those meh backed/not backed trophies coming along? Should I go ahead and take down the tent I’ve been living in by my mailbox?
@therealjrn the “trophies” are at my house waiting to be boxed. I am finishing a few details and fell behind due to some school/professional responsibilities. Mostly I had to get a prospectus out along with a few conference presentation proposals. In any case they will be going out shortly, I need to find a better sized box or they have to ship in large flat rate boxes (ew). So I’ll be delayed till some uline boxes show up.
@bleedmichigan conference presentations…good luck with them. I have 5 of those plus a symposium to review that I have been putting off. Each year that I volunteer to do that I then kick myself that I have done so.
@Kidsandliz the best part is that one of the presentations is based on my dissertation which has one chapter done and it’s not the chapter the presentation is on. My advisor seems to dislike my take on the information so he keeps sending me books to read to counter my argument but I don’t think he is reading the books before sending them my way because none of them have been applicable. Even better tonight’s suggestion is in a language that I don’t read well and it might actually be applicable.
@bleedmichigan What dimensions do you need? Also expected shipping weight - 1 or 2 pounds or less than 13 ounces? There are some free boxes at usps.com that might work better than the large flat rate.
@speediedelivery I’m actually very familiar with the usps box sizes having spent 4 years working in e-commerce warehouse and shipping. Unfortunately I need about a half inch larger in every direction over a medium flat rate. So chances are I’ll ship on my UPS account and have it be as cheap if not cheaper than flat rate shipping.
@bleedmichigan 2 chapters more or less done is good. Remember that the goal is to get out. Being at serious odds with your advisor isn’t going to help that. Dissertations vanish into obscurity. The best dissertation is a done dissertation. The papers you write at least land in article databases. Your papers on your dissertation can be somewhat different than your dissertation.
It might be worth paying for a translation of the book if it is applicable. Dumping a paragraph at a time through google translate will take forever. If there is a pdf file kicking around somewhere online might be worth downloading that and then paying for an auto translate and just deal with the uncleaned up version.
Might be worth having a face to face with your advisor and find out what he thinks of where you are headed. Try to get him to be very specific and then address that specifically. If he is off track orally try to get him to understand his “misunderstanding” without making it look like that. Try not to care what your dissertation will look like. You can write whatever you want when you turn it into articles.
Also tell him you appreciate him sending you suggestions of things to read that might be applicable; that you are looking for literature that is targeted specifically to your topic (being specific in ways that go beyond what you have already told him) like the book in the foreign language; if he knows of any more like that - in English or not - you’d love the suggestions.
You also have to figure out what what your advisor needs to then feel like you are seriously considering his point of view. Might help to get him to be really specific about what he is objecting to. Then address it. You are going to continue to butt heads if he thinks you are blowing off his viewpoint (remember a lot of what goes on with dissertations is political). Better to address it that way than butt heads if you think he is wrong, doesn’t understand the topic as well as you do, etc. You might want to have a page or two in the lit review addressing what he thinks is relevant and explain why it isn’t (have that conversation in person first though as once you are done with that you may not need to do that). Find out his expectations and meet them. Remind yourself over and over that the goal is to be done and pass your defense. End of story.
In fact you could pull the stunt of removing those paragraphs (addressing his off base point of view) from the copy that you turn in (formally) to the university if you think that crap is way out of line, but in the copies you give for your defense and to him when you are done has that in there. I dumped a bunch of Ho’s between my proposal and the final product and no one noticed/commented. Also my final product was about 125 pages but I knew my advisor/committee would yap that it was too short so I added a line of leading and moved the margins in ever so fractionally. No one noticed and it added about another 25 pages which made them happy. I undid that for the copies I turned into the library (in fact I then removed another line of leading to shorten it even more to save money on the acid free copies). The copies the committee got I left the length alone. No one even noticed.
My advisor had no clue what I was doing stats wise (network analysis that then was dumped into other stats software to do other stuff with that) and so I wrote that chapter at a level my mom would understand (she was a kindergarten teacher). That way he wouldn’t feel dumb. It helped me not to feel as irritated by casting doing that way would help anyone else reading my dissertation to understand what the heck I was doing (no one on my committee really knew what I was doing so I had to get my outside help/critical comments elsewhere). As a result I got no questions on my methods section or about the stats.
For some advisors this is partly about ego - theirs. It can also be political depending on who is on your committee. If you end up at an impasse just give in. It isn’t worth the fight which may lengthen the time you are stuck working on it. What you later publish can have whatever you want in it. Also find out if your advisor has this “norm” of how long it takes to do a dissertation. Mine did. Mine took me about 6 weeks if I were to have put in the days and hours consecutively (chapter 2 took the longest, chapters 4&5 took a total of 48 hours, data analysis took about 6 days, 3.5 of which was having to learn how to use SAS on the fly as I over ran the number of data cells in SPSS, I was also learning how to use UCINET). I actually waited to turn some stuff in that was already done because of his expectation of how long it takes to do this stuff. Also knowing he checked properties I also jury rigged that by making it look like I did more editing time (wrote an ohter paper in the middle of it, then copy/pasted that paper into a new doc but that gave me more editing time showing up in properties; did a last modified and last saved the same day I’d give him a copy even if it had been sitting for a while) PITA but saved other hassles.
Just think of the entire thing as a game. You need to jump through some flaming hoops to get out. Just jump and get out. BTW my paper on my dissertation (submitted to the professional organization) was one of the 8 or 10 nominated for best paper on a dissertation - didn’t win but just getting nominated was a big deal. The paper didn’t have any of the crap I was forced to put in the dissertation that, given a choice, I wouldn’t have put in there. One committee member kept insisting I had one of the underlying concepts wrong - I finally told him I was using the definition that the guy at Stanford who started this line of study used. While he still didn’t agree with me that shut him up.
I did put a paragraph in the dissertation addressing his viewpoint with "while some may think X which is a viewpoint that could be used, Y (well known in the field name) defined the concept as Z and that is what I will be using following his line of reasoning (said in a longer way and more article style of writing babble, but that was the point I was making). The line of reasoning I was using was accepted as “true” in my field and the one that faculty was using showed his ignorance (had to be careful with that).
That man was only on my committee because my advisor wanted him there. I figured it he wanted him there then there has to be a reason so I agreed. Later it came in handy as someone in his same field at a job interview brought up the same point and I said something like, “X on my committee also viewed it the way you have and here is why I didn’t go that direction…blah blah blah”. I was later told that I handled his attack really well and they were impressed how I didn’t get rattled (umm duh I had spend several full committee meetings and my proposal defense defending my view with that man LOL). So there finally was an upside.
Pay attention to your chair’s opinion as you may need to defend yourself at a job talk if someone else takes the same point of view. Knowing the details of his objections/disagreements may help you in the future.
Good luck with this all this stuff.
Oh yeah - if you can turn in your proposal with, essentially, the first 3 chapters done done it will make finishing easier as all you will need to do is 4 & 5 and not flesh out the first 3. By the time you get to that point you will be sick to death of the entire torture exercise.
@bleedmichigan Just making sure you knew your options. Sounds like #7 box would be a bit too big and the shoe a bit too small. I work for usps so that is my first thought for shipping. I don’t know the other carriers info without looking.
Also - I am enjoying the tank pictures. My cats would love one as a toy/treat. I don’t have the patience and knowledge to care for a tank.
@Kidsandliz so my my committee has two main advisors and they do not see eye to eye. Advisor 1 wanted me to write on Nationalism, Advisor 2 asked what I wanted to do. I created a proposal that examines the cultural infiltration of Nazism from 1933 to 45. I specifically look at gestures and other cultural commonalities. Adviser 2 thought it was great because it melds history and anthropology and some psychology. Advisor 1 said it was a waste of time. He is sending me readings on culture and other things that may or may not be useful mostly not. He also wants me to basically create a prospectus for a paper on nationalism just in case. He has demanded that I present a portion of my idea at an upcoming conference. If the topic gets good support he will let me do it, if not then I am supposed to do nationalism. Personally there is enough on nationalism already from Gellner, Hastings, Smith, etc that I don’t need to add to it in a dissertation. So lots of fun. The two chapters I have written were parts of longer papers for 8xx research classes.
So I realize the point is to get out but I have to enjoy this exercise or what’s the point?
My neighbors growing up had a tank…and cats. I went over one day to feed the cats when they were on vacation and one of the cats had pierced the seal in the sidewall of the tank (was an octagon with vertical seams) and there was this lovely horizontal stream shooting across the room. Fortunately I got there before too much of the water had gotten out and was able to stop it…
@bleedmichigan So can you change your committee at this point in time? If yes ask Advisor #2 whom they would suggest to have on your committee instead of advisor #1 (unless there is a really, really good reason to keep advisor #1). That is how I ended up with an asshole on my committee HOWEVER he was an asshole my advisor could control because they were friends. As a result when there was conflict they worked it out without dragging me into it.
If you can’t, for whatever reason, dump advisor #1 then ask advisor #2 help with dealing with this situation (hopefully #2 is tenured as if that person is not they may not be willing to enter a conflict with advisor #1). This entire dissertation process is hugely political. It is partly this kind of crap that prevents folks from finishing.
As far as enjoying it… in an ideal world yes. Look at your long term goals though. If they require a finished PhD then this current dissertation conflict just a bump in the road. Unfortunately you may just need to “deal with it”. I had to repeat to myself multiple times (I was in an abusive department) “There are good reasons why I decided to get a phd. The fact that I can’t think of any of them right now is not good enough reason to drop out.”.
If you have to switch to something else to get out if you can’t change advisors then do so if advisor #1 will never let you out otherwise. Not finishing is the worst option. Keep working on your other idea (it is a hell of a lot faster to do research when not doing it dissertation style) and dump the dissertation when you are done with it, other than getting the obligatory paper out of it. Try to get a paper submitted for publication after the conference presentation (presuming it is accepted; take feedback from the reviewers and comments at the presentation into consideration when revising the conference paper for publication). Then at job talks when you state your research interests focus on the idea you like. If questioned about why the dissertation is on something else, just state that your advisor preferred you choose that idea over the one where your research is headed because that more closely overlapped his area - or some such other benign comment (do not trash your advisor and don’t lie about their interests as it is a small world out there).
@bleedmichigan@speediedelivery Yeah fish tanks are cat TV. My kid wanted fish at one point. Gold fish live about 20 years, are bright, and interact with the world outside the fish tank (of course you need at least 5 gallons per fish or they die after a couple of years). We had 3 feeder goldfish. They traveled in their 6 gallon tank together as a group, when a cat or one of us came up to the tank they came over to look at us… The cats LOVED that and Max would sit right there staring at them tapping the tank with his paw, etc. Fish would swoosh away and come right back. It was almost, but not quite, worth having goldfish for the cat TV entertainment.
Kid got sick of fish pretty quickly (and I found they are more freaking work than cats!!!), gave the fish away to someone who had a big enough tank. I had then gotten beta fish when I realized the goldfish were in too small a tank; when she got sick of fish I gave the tank and those fish to another family. The cats did not find the beta fish as entertaining.
@bleedmichigan@Kidsandliz@speediedelivery
yeah, goldfish are pretty cool. We bought 6 (1 inch long) solid orange goldfish from the local wal-mart to put in an outdoor pond (about 250? gallons I think) a couple of years ago. 3 disappeared, but the remainder actually managed to survive, are now about 4-5 inches long and were able to breed.
Now there are an assortment of about a dozen progeny that are anything BUT solid orange colored. Some are pale cream with spots, some gold with black spots, some are just black etc. All are about 3/4 inch at the moment and after the winter I will fish them all out, clean the pond then restock it with the most interesting and give the rest to friends with a pond.
and an elegance coral in the back of the picture.
Wow! Is the coral really that blue or is it just the lighting? Who else lives in the tank?
I assume that’s fluorescence under a black light - looks great, though.
@aetris not black light. The coral does have fluorescent coloring but in this photo it’s under a wavelength of bulb that brings out the color. About 400nm to 450nm
@Kyeh let’s see there is a yellow tang, blue tang, sail tang, 4 clownfish, two Goby a skunk cleaner shrimp, a three stripe damsel, a domino damsel, a peppermint shrimp, a clown tang, a blue mouth trigger and some other corals. Tomorrow brings some more coral and Wednesday I get some interesting invertebrates. I’ll post some more pictures this week.
@bleedmichigan So beautiful! That sounds like a fabulous collection - I can’t wait to see more!
So pretty!
Nice.
More, please!
Yes, moar.
/giphy “go fish”
Cool. Looking forward to more pics.
Should have titled this thread as:
The Offishial Tank Thread
Do you have one of these in there?
The species is “Miro-9L”.
I like this thread.
Here’s a picture of my anemone.
@Weboh
@mike808
One of my other elegance corals this one is an Australian gold tip and you can see the yellow tang in the corner.
@bleedmichigan Wonder why they named it “gold tip”?
It’s really pretty and I’m sure the pictures don’t do it justice in real life.
@bleedmichigan @mike808 If he had it under regular lighting instead of the super-blue (actinic) lighting, the tips would appear gold. The blue light brings out the more neon colors and washes out the rest. In my tank, I have a coral that looks brown under regular lighting but neon orange under actinic lighting.
@mike808 @Weboh actually even under actinic in real life the tips look gold. The picture just doesn’t work. Here is a picture looking down from the store with a better camera and no glass in the way. Same exact coral piece.
@bleedmichigan @Weboh
/image it’s full of stars
@bleedmichigan @mike808 It’s beautiful. Now we can definitely see why it’s called elegance.
Also, “a picture looking down from the store?” Do you own a fish store??
@Weboh It’s the picture he took at the store before he bought the coral.
One of the cooler additions the Sea Hare. The clownfish photobombed me but you can see the hare in the back.
@bleedmichigan Hopefully you have enough hair algae to feed it. I’ve been through a few and they usually die out shortly after the hair algae is gone. They can eat some caulerpa and the stuff that grows on the glass, but the main part of their diet needs to be hair algae.
@Weboh I have some hair algae but in my last tank I had great success feeding red micro algae to my sea hare. Then I moved and sold the tank. So I have a refugium full of red macro so I hopefully will be good to go.
Time for another picture. Some stuff that’s been seen before and a Blue Throat Trigger
@bleedmichigan That’s an excellent picture.
@mike808 thanks it’s hard to get a good picture in that tank due to it being a bow front
Hi there @bleedmichigan How’s those meh backed/not backed trophies coming along? Should I go ahead and take down the tent I’ve been living in by my mailbox?
@therealjrn the “trophies” are at my house waiting to be boxed. I am finishing a few details and fell behind due to some school/professional responsibilities. Mostly I had to get a prospectus out along with a few conference presentation proposals. In any case they will be going out shortly, I need to find a better sized box or they have to ship in large flat rate boxes (ew). So I’ll be delayed till some uline boxes show up.
@bleedmichigan @therealjrn how exciting!!
Maybe see what type of boxes Fed Ex has available. They are free and technically no reason you cannot ship USPS with them.
@bleedmichigan conference presentations…good luck with them. I have 5 of those plus a symposium to review that I have been putting off. Each year that I volunteer to do that I then kick myself that I have done so.
@Kidsandliz the best part is that one of the presentations is based on my dissertation which has one chapter done and it’s not the chapter the presentation is on. My advisor seems to dislike my take on the information so he keeps sending me books to read to counter my argument but I don’t think he is reading the books before sending them my way because none of them have been applicable. Even better tonight’s suggestion is in a language that I don’t read well and it might actually be applicable.
@bleedmichigan What dimensions do you need? Also expected shipping weight - 1 or 2 pounds or less than 13 ounces? There are some free boxes at usps.com that might work better than the large flat rate.
@speediedelivery I’m actually very familiar with the usps box sizes having spent 4 years working in e-commerce warehouse and shipping. Unfortunately I need about a half inch larger in every direction over a medium flat rate. So chances are I’ll ship on my UPS account and have it be as cheap if not cheaper than flat rate shipping.
@bleedmichigan 2 chapters more or less done is good. Remember that the goal is to get out. Being at serious odds with your advisor isn’t going to help that. Dissertations vanish into obscurity. The best dissertation is a done dissertation. The papers you write at least land in article databases. Your papers on your dissertation can be somewhat different than your dissertation.
It might be worth paying for a translation of the book if it is applicable. Dumping a paragraph at a time through google translate will take forever. If there is a pdf file kicking around somewhere online might be worth downloading that and then paying for an auto translate and just deal with the uncleaned up version.
Might be worth having a face to face with your advisor and find out what he thinks of where you are headed. Try to get him to be very specific and then address that specifically. If he is off track orally try to get him to understand his “misunderstanding” without making it look like that. Try not to care what your dissertation will look like. You can write whatever you want when you turn it into articles.
Also tell him you appreciate him sending you suggestions of things to read that might be applicable; that you are looking for literature that is targeted specifically to your topic (being specific in ways that go beyond what you have already told him) like the book in the foreign language; if he knows of any more like that - in English or not - you’d love the suggestions.
You also have to figure out what what your advisor needs to then feel like you are seriously considering his point of view. Might help to get him to be really specific about what he is objecting to. Then address it. You are going to continue to butt heads if he thinks you are blowing off his viewpoint (remember a lot of what goes on with dissertations is political). Better to address it that way than butt heads if you think he is wrong, doesn’t understand the topic as well as you do, etc. You might want to have a page or two in the lit review addressing what he thinks is relevant and explain why it isn’t (have that conversation in person first though as once you are done with that you may not need to do that). Find out his expectations and meet them. Remind yourself over and over that the goal is to be done and pass your defense. End of story.
In fact you could pull the stunt of removing those paragraphs (addressing his off base point of view) from the copy that you turn in (formally) to the university if you think that crap is way out of line, but in the copies you give for your defense and to him when you are done has that in there. I dumped a bunch of Ho’s between my proposal and the final product and no one noticed/commented. Also my final product was about 125 pages but I knew my advisor/committee would yap that it was too short so I added a line of leading and moved the margins in ever so fractionally. No one noticed and it added about another 25 pages which made them happy. I undid that for the copies I turned into the library (in fact I then removed another line of leading to shorten it even more to save money on the acid free copies). The copies the committee got I left the length alone. No one even noticed.
My advisor had no clue what I was doing stats wise (network analysis that then was dumped into other stats software to do other stuff with that) and so I wrote that chapter at a level my mom would understand (she was a kindergarten teacher). That way he wouldn’t feel dumb. It helped me not to feel as irritated by casting doing that way would help anyone else reading my dissertation to understand what the heck I was doing (no one on my committee really knew what I was doing so I had to get my outside help/critical comments elsewhere). As a result I got no questions on my methods section or about the stats.
For some advisors this is partly about ego - theirs. It can also be political depending on who is on your committee. If you end up at an impasse just give in. It isn’t worth the fight which may lengthen the time you are stuck working on it. What you later publish can have whatever you want in it. Also find out if your advisor has this “norm” of how long it takes to do a dissertation. Mine did. Mine took me about 6 weeks if I were to have put in the days and hours consecutively (chapter 2 took the longest, chapters 4&5 took a total of 48 hours, data analysis took about 6 days, 3.5 of which was having to learn how to use SAS on the fly as I over ran the number of data cells in SPSS, I was also learning how to use UCINET). I actually waited to turn some stuff in that was already done because of his expectation of how long it takes to do this stuff. Also knowing he checked properties I also jury rigged that by making it look like I did more editing time (wrote an ohter paper in the middle of it, then copy/pasted that paper into a new doc but that gave me more editing time showing up in properties; did a last modified and last saved the same day I’d give him a copy even if it had been sitting for a while) PITA but saved other hassles.
Just think of the entire thing as a game. You need to jump through some flaming hoops to get out. Just jump and get out. BTW my paper on my dissertation (submitted to the professional organization) was one of the 8 or 10 nominated for best paper on a dissertation - didn’t win but just getting nominated was a big deal. The paper didn’t have any of the crap I was forced to put in the dissertation that, given a choice, I wouldn’t have put in there. One committee member kept insisting I had one of the underlying concepts wrong - I finally told him I was using the definition that the guy at Stanford who started this line of study used. While he still didn’t agree with me that shut him up.
I did put a paragraph in the dissertation addressing his viewpoint with "while some may think X which is a viewpoint that could be used, Y (well known in the field name) defined the concept as Z and that is what I will be using following his line of reasoning (said in a longer way and more article style of writing babble, but that was the point I was making). The line of reasoning I was using was accepted as “true” in my field and the one that faculty was using showed his ignorance (had to be careful with that).
That man was only on my committee because my advisor wanted him there. I figured it he wanted him there then there has to be a reason so I agreed. Later it came in handy as someone in his same field at a job interview brought up the same point and I said something like, “X on my committee also viewed it the way you have and here is why I didn’t go that direction…blah blah blah”. I was later told that I handled his attack really well and they were impressed how I didn’t get rattled (umm duh I had spend several full committee meetings and my proposal defense defending my view with that man LOL). So there finally was an upside.
Pay attention to your chair’s opinion as you may need to defend yourself at a job talk if someone else takes the same point of view. Knowing the details of his objections/disagreements may help you in the future.
Good luck with this all this stuff.
Oh yeah - if you can turn in your proposal with, essentially, the first 3 chapters done done it will make finishing easier as all you will need to do is 4 & 5 and not flesh out the first 3. By the time you get to that point you will be sick to death of the entire
tortureexercise.@bleedmichigan Just making sure you knew your options. Sounds like #7 box would be a bit too big and the shoe a bit too small. I work for usps so that is my first thought for shipping. I don’t know the other carriers info without looking.
Also - I am enjoying the tank pictures. My cats would love one as a toy/treat. I don’t have the patience and knowledge to care for a tank.
@Kidsandliz so my my committee has two main advisors and they do not see eye to eye. Advisor 1 wanted me to write on Nationalism, Advisor 2 asked what I wanted to do. I created a proposal that examines the cultural infiltration of Nazism from 1933 to 45. I specifically look at gestures and other cultural commonalities. Adviser 2 thought it was great because it melds history and anthropology and some psychology. Advisor 1 said it was a waste of time. He is sending me readings on culture and other things that may or may not be useful mostly not. He also wants me to basically create a prospectus for a paper on nationalism just in case. He has demanded that I present a portion of my idea at an upcoming conference. If the topic gets good support he will let me do it, if not then I am supposed to do nationalism. Personally there is enough on nationalism already from Gellner, Hastings, Smith, etc that I don’t need to add to it in a dissertation. So lots of fun. The two chapters I have written were parts of longer papers for 8xx research classes.
So I realize the point is to get out but I have to enjoy this exercise or what’s the point?
@bleedmichigan @speediedelivery
My neighbors growing up had a tank…and cats. I went over one day to feed the cats when they were on vacation and one of the cats had pierced the seal in the sidewall of the tank (was an octagon with vertical seams) and there was this lovely horizontal stream shooting across the room. Fortunately I got there before too much of the water had gotten out and was able to stop it…
@bleedmichigan So can you change your committee at this point in time? If yes ask Advisor #2 whom they would suggest to have on your committee instead of advisor #1 (unless there is a really, really good reason to keep advisor #1). That is how I ended up with an asshole on my committee HOWEVER he was an asshole my advisor could control because they were friends. As a result when there was conflict they worked it out without dragging me into it.
If you can’t, for whatever reason, dump advisor #1 then ask advisor #2 help with dealing with this situation (hopefully #2 is tenured as if that person is not they may not be willing to enter a conflict with advisor #1). This entire dissertation process is hugely political. It is partly this kind of crap that prevents folks from finishing.
As far as enjoying it… in an ideal world yes. Look at your long term goals though. If they require a finished PhD then this current dissertation conflict just a bump in the road. Unfortunately you may just need to “deal with it”. I had to repeat to myself multiple times (I was in an abusive department) “There are good reasons why I decided to get a phd. The fact that I can’t think of any of them right now is not good enough reason to drop out.”.
If you have to switch to something else to get out if you can’t change advisors then do so if advisor #1 will never let you out otherwise. Not finishing is the worst option. Keep working on your other idea (it is a hell of a lot faster to do research when not doing it dissertation style) and dump the dissertation when you are done with it, other than getting the obligatory paper out of it. Try to get a paper submitted for publication after the conference presentation (presuming it is accepted; take feedback from the reviewers and comments at the presentation into consideration when revising the conference paper for publication). Then at job talks when you state your research interests focus on the idea you like. If questioned about why the dissertation is on something else, just state that your advisor preferred you choose that idea over the one where your research is headed because that more closely overlapped his area - or some such other benign comment (do not trash your advisor and don’t lie about their interests as it is a small world out there).
@bleedmichigan @speediedelivery Yeah fish tanks are cat TV. My kid wanted fish at one point. Gold fish live about 20 years, are bright, and interact with the world outside the fish tank (of course you need at least 5 gallons per fish or they die after a couple of years). We had 3 feeder goldfish. They traveled in their 6 gallon tank together as a group, when a cat or one of us came up to the tank they came over to look at us… The cats LOVED that and Max would sit right there staring at them tapping the tank with his paw, etc. Fish would swoosh away and come right back. It was almost, but not quite, worth having goldfish for the cat TV entertainment.
Kid got sick of fish pretty quickly (and I found they are more freaking work than cats!!!), gave the fish away to someone who had a big enough tank. I had then gotten beta fish when I realized the goldfish were in too small a tank; when she got sick of fish I gave the tank and those fish to another family. The cats did not find the beta fish as entertaining.
@bleedmichigan PS good luck. The process can suck bricks at times.
@bleedmichigan @Kidsandliz @speediedelivery
yeah, goldfish are pretty cool. We bought 6 (1 inch long) solid orange goldfish from the local wal-mart to put in an outdoor pond (about 250? gallons I think) a couple of years ago. 3 disappeared, but the remainder actually managed to survive, are now about 4-5 inches long and were able to breed.
Now there are an assortment of about a dozen progeny that are anything BUT solid orange colored. Some are pale cream with spots, some gold with black spots, some are just black etc. All are about 3/4 inch at the moment and after the winter I will fish them all out, clean the pond then restock it with the most interesting and give the rest to friends with a pond.