R & R

This past Tuesday was a pretty exciting day for me-- I got my first R & R. For those of you outside the academic world (which I imagine is most of my readers...), R & R translates to 'revise and resubmit.' Personally- this is a big deal! Why?


Well, my senior year of college I wrote an honors thesis and presented some of my findings at a conference in Vegas. This past fall, one of my new profs encouraged me to submit it for publication. I figured it would be a good experience to rewrite something (AKA take something from 60-something pages to 20) and just go through the process of how to submit an article. I did not expect it to be given the R&R. [Aside- very rarely are papers in peer-reviewed journals accepted outright; the R&R is the standard] I mailed of my manuscript in August and didn't hear back until today.


I open the letter and it read that I just have to revise it based on the [anonymous] reviewer(s)'s critiques/suggestions, and then resubmit. This makes me that much closer to being published in a peer-reviewed journal.


This is a big deal because:
1) I don't even have my Master's yet.
2) When it comes to finding jobs post-graduation, the number of publications is an important factor
3) Dude, publication. That's just cool.


Maybe I'm excited about this because I'm a nerd. But I'm OK with that. Admittedly there is a lot of work involved in the revising process, but hey-- I am in grad school. It's not supposed to be easy, right? 


I'm not published yet, mind you, but baby steps.