It's been a crazy few weeks. Actually, the rush started after I finished the main programming for my project... having the code actually run is great, but that's when the science really started. After the program started spitting out the results, the hard questions started flooding in from my supervisors: Are you ABSOLUTELY sure there's no bugs in your code? Do the results make sense? What's this feature over at 10 keV?
The crux of the matter was that I had to take full responsibility to my work, as it would eventually (hopefully) make its way into the body of scientific knowledge. Last summer, I was carrying out science as well, but there was a lot more hand-holding in the sense that I already had the program sitting there waiting for me, and I just had to feed it numbers and hope that the outputs matched the observed results. Even when I had to help Yong Chen make modifications to the code (adding in the flared disk geometry), there wasn't such a sense of responsibility as it didn't seem as if the work was going be published.
However, it has been made clear to me that if things work out well, I will be carrying forward with my work over summer, and possibly be the principal author for a paper on the work. Also, the fact that I wrote the program myself means that I'm personally responsible for any cock-ups in it. At every step of the way, I had to double- and triple- check everything to make sure that there are no mistakes, and that everything can be explained in a convincing manner.
In that sense, it's an honour that my supervisors have entrusted me with this project, as third year students are normally thrown some problem that has already been solved, instead of giving original work. But there IS a completely different attitude, may I say a scientific attitude that I have to adopt....
Actually, one of the main reasons I've been so busy is because I have been working on my final project report....which is FIFTY bloody pages long. And the worst thing is that I have the entire thing sitting in my head, but whenever I sit down to put it down into the report it doesn't seem to work immediately, and I have to spend ages modifying and perfecting every single bit before I can let it go. Repeat ad infinitum for 50 pages....