Perhaps the most frustrating problem for students during their final years of graduate school is that there is no clear stopping point. No matter how much the student has already accomplished there will always be another set of experiments to do. And the last year of graduate school is often the most productive. Suddenly, projects that took an eternity to set up begin paying off. Experiments that have stubbornly refused to work for years abruptly and inexplicably relent, yielding long-sought results.
New experiments work like a charm, even on the first try.
A steady flow of data pours into lab notebooks as never before. At this time of unprecedented success at the bench, students understandably find it difficult to decide when to stop doing experiments and start writing their thesis. Even for those who feel more than ready to graduate, the last year can be nerve-racking. TAC members and advisers must be persuaded to check that box, a task that isn't always as straightforward as the student might hope. There are no written standards, no specifications for how many publications, how much data, or how many years must go into a thesis.