When it rains it pours

Out here in my part of the country today that applies literally as well as methaphorically.

Today was the official start of the new term and I managed to run at least 5-10 minutes behind all day it seemed. Constantly playing catch-up. Isn't that just the bitch of it?! I have no deadlines and nothing I absolutely have to do for at least two weeks, and then stuff all crashes down in one day.

Interesting candidate presentation at Metro today with someone whose research interests are right up my alley. Very personable too it seemed. But I was a few minutes late, missed my opportunity to talk further at lunch because of another commitment and missed another shot at talking because of class. I think my Metro dept. is going to wind up on the fence here, and for selfish reasons of research connections that would be disappointing.

The class thing was a bit disorganized but I think that's to be expected when you're trying to do it for the first time via video conference. I hope it settles out in the next few weeks. I may have to rework what my proposal was/is for my deliverable for this "class".

And that is connected to my biggest headache of the day. It came at the very end too, when Astro relayed some news of a meeting with LooseGoose as we walked out of our building to go home. Seems LooseGoose is backpedaling now on the whole "yes you're funded" bit that Advocate communicated to us back in November. [here is where I was going to link to a post about that, but apparently I didn't actually write about it. d'oh] We hear one thing, think we may lose our funding support because the Principal Investigator may not get the grant refunded/renewed, then we hear something and we think we do have guaranteed funding, now same-said PI (LooseGoose) is saying "no, no guarantee on $$".

Now, is this because our dept at Metro doesn't have the $$ they thought they did? is it because the dept. doesn't really want to fund us because they don't think we're 'worthy' somehow (this too is now being implied)? Is it because the dept. wants or needs the $$ to go get some more poor naive new PhD students (never mind that we have too many at pre-candidacy stage already)? is it because LooseGoose doesn't think the investigator team did such a great job on the grant renewal proposal and is gonna get shot down...or it gets shot down because 'we' didn't do 'enough' to warrant more $$ from said funding agency? or some other odd combination of money, politics, poor planning? Becuase I think it's a bit late to tell us we have to go find new funding on our own to replace our stipends, particularly when they haven't prepared us in the least to go write a grant proposal like that, and while we're moving along on our dissertation proposals, we wouldn't qualify for any of the funding that goes to those at dissertation stage of the game. DAMN their disorganization!!! I'm so pissed right now...

I know it's not like this in other schools in my discipline. I know it's not like this in all similar PhD programs...and I'm even pretty sure it's not like this in other disciplines (hassles sure, different problems, but better organization from the websites and blogs and books i've read!).

My program is just one big headache.
And it's only the first day of the bloody term!! C'mon!! Who did I piss off in academia in a former life??
...or in this one?!