when is it time to cut your losses?

I’ve worked on this one paper since 2003. I’ve submitted it & had it rejected once, and it’s been sitting in my “things to do once I have time” pile for the last year. I finally had time to work on it today, and can’t make significant headway on it. I now see how it falls short in making a potential contribution to the field. I could get it to do so, but this would involve a great deal of work and the focus of the paper would be dramatically different as a result (i.e., I wouldn’t be able to meet my original goals for the paper). As sad as I am to have wasted years of work, I think it’s just time to move on with more fruitful endeavors.

This begs the larger question… how can you tell if/when it’s time to cut your losses?

an update on my Chronicle piece

Months ago I blogged about my forthcoming Chronicle piece about having ADD & being on the academic job market. A few weeks’ ago I started to become concerned that I hadn’t heard anything from the editor since the article was accepted as a “First Person” piece. I sent a follow-up email, and as it happens, they hadn’t checked the email account used to send the acceptance email since sending the acceptance message months ago.

<sigh…. they expected somebody with ADD to reply to a different email address without specifying this in the message?!?!?>

Regardless, they are still interested in publishing an updated version of the piece. I did this and sent it a couple of weeks ago. I hope to add the link here someday soon!

the grim future of academia

“Higher education — which I had always assumed to have my best interests at heart — had become a kind of pyramid scheme with us at the bottom, the new academic proletariat.”

If I let myself think about academia’s grim future for more than a few minutes at a time, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate long enough to get anything done.

wanted: ADD-friendly statistical software

I really, really, really want a software package capable of running two analyses at once. I have spent the entire day running about 12 models. Each takes about 10 minutes to run because they are pretty complex. For the last hour I’ve been repeating the ones I did this morning with a minor tweak. All I need to do is check them to ensure that the story is still the same. But, since I can only run one at a time, it’s taking forever. What I really need is a software package that does multiple SEMs at once, or at least does them faster!

Head hurts… I made so little progress today, and the resubmission is due back to the journal in a month! This is going to be a stretch, even if the rest of the month runs smoothly. We have 4 reviews on this paper, and quite a few of them involve conceptual/theoretical implications. I’m the first author but am not all that invested in the conceptual side, as this paper is outside of my mainstream research interests. I did it mostly because my boss need a statistician, but I have a sinking feeling that I will end up making nearly all of the revisions, including the conceptual ones about which I couldn’t care less.

In better news, the top journal in my sub-discipline conditionally accepted an article I’ve been working on for 3 years. My grad advisors and I are very pleased with the decision, and the remaining changes shouldn’t take too much effort or time (i.e., they don’t involve running complicated stats models!). I’m much more invested in this paper, and expect it to get a good response upon publication. Yay for small milestones