SPSPooky Tales on the Writing Process

By Lucy Zheng

Read time: 2 minutes

October is a time for fun and games (and scary movies), but it’s also a time to get closer to our fellow graduate students. We asked the SPSP student community to share some cautionary tales on the writing process in the hopes that others might relate to and learn from their experiences.

• I was applying for my first ever national fellowship as a graduate student, and one of my letter writers who had agreed to write me a recommendation, completely stopped responding to me. I haven't heard from them since!
   
• In my first semester of graduate school I was very overzealous. I began a project with a cohort-mate, wrote over three quarters of the paper, and then never heard from them again. Whenever I would ask I would hear that they were "working on it" but I never saw any actual writing. Then six months later I hear from their faculty mentor that I "stole" the project and refused to work on it. I was crushed. All my hard work and it somehow ruined my reputation and my friendship.
   
• I wrote my entire manuscript based on analyses run by a lab mate (it was my first year and I didn’t know R that well yet). It wasn’t until I was reviewing the analyses one last time before submitting to a journal that I realized the data hadn’t been cleaned! Ever since then, I’ve run every set of analyses multiple times before even starting on the manuscript!

Thank you everyone who shared your writing mishap stories, and Happy Halloween!