Lost in the Research

[decent]

Hello gang--since I'm distance engineering student, my Masters work seems mostly to boil internally without a lot of academic socialization by which I could lament my struggles and find camaraderie, so I'm thankful for the TGC even if it is "bunch of strangers".

I'll try to keep this short and field generic:

No thesis here just a culminating 3hr experience, to be executed during the summer in order to make my PhD program in the fall at an in-residence school.  My advisor indicated that it would be wise to get a jumpmon the research before the summer, to which I did this Spring by running and analyzing models developed by the advisor.  About 2/3s through spring, I informed the advisor that what we were trying to capture was not "working" but that with some more time I could investigate other options.  THEN we know how end of semesters can be, and I put this project on the backburner.  With the advisors permission, I enrolled in the research credit with this topic in mind still.  Very early this summer I exhausted my possible options by examining the problem in force. It seems the advisor's model is limited in scope until the commercial vendor of the modeling software could provide support for a "bug" of this advanced functionality by which I am to write a paper.

I report such, the advisor reports that there is a new system update to said software--I implement this software, and get the same bug.  I don't hear back from my advisor for quite some while.  In the meantime, I begin developing my own model from an "open-source" code library, that is very powerful yet has some weaknesses in its documentation and my understanding of its advanced functionality.  My hope was that I could still solve the question with a transposed model from my advisor's.  Again I'm a distance learning student and don't see or hear from my advisor too much. BUT finally the advisor writes back after I've sent regular updates 2-3 times of my "independent" work including the last one being my opinion that the level of theory and time to dedicate in a summer was steep.  My Advisor wrote back to say "give it two more weeks" and then write up what you have.

So the struggle for me has been all the sweat and tears poured into both models, without anything working to show a working model, successful or unsuccessfully predicting our hypothesis.  I don't even know how I could write something of consequence without a model utilizing the advance functionality.  My last email to my advisor last week asking about some technical details has gone unanswered.

Not sure what to do in order to graduate this summer.  Any advice on where/how I should spend my energies?

[rising_star]

Can you write about the models and their development, rather than trying to write about the results produced by the model?