i'm not a quitter, i'm not a quitter...even though at times like these i desperately want to!!!

OMG. A horrible, no good, very bad thing happened to me this week. My thesis advisor called me and said, and I quote, "there is something wrong with the data that we've collected." WTF?!?! What do you mean something is wrong??? I have been collecting data since last January and there might be something wrong with it? That is just not possible...I was wrong. It is very possible and now a reality for me. After looking at the problem for a couple of hours we figured it out but that doesn't save all that I have previously collected.

Let me first explain that collecting data for my project is not easy. Students are required to come back five times but somehow undergrad students are just not that accountable and I have had a lot of drop-outs. Anyways, it took me 11 months to get the 40 that I do have and now that might have been all in vain.

Back to the problem, I may have lost about 30 of the 40 I have collected. One of the biggest bummers of my life. Dropping out of the project was my first thought, I'm not gonna lie. But after some inspirational words and apologies from my advisor I thought quitting is not what I want at all. So, I left the meeting feeling like whatever the circumstance I would keep plugging away.

Well, after my advisor spoke with another professor who works with the computer program that we use, he discovered that there is a chance that we can recover the data. Whew!!! I don't want to celebrate just yet but things are looking pretty positive right now. We will see what can actually be done. In the meantime, I'm frantically trying to create a "readable" (as my advisor suggested) draft to submit on the 1st of Dec. and there is a small chance that I can still propose my project before the end of the semester.

Best case scenario: I will have data for all 40 people collected thus far as well as a proposal before Christmas. Worst case scenario: I will only have data for about 12 people and I will not get my proposal in before Christmas. Either way, quitting is not the answer--even if I really want to.