Dissertation & Internship lazy crap for crap

So. I'm am knee deep in the deepest crap ever now. I am busy applying for internship while trying to develop a dissertation topic at the same time. Why are you doing this at the same time you ask? Didn't you plan ahead and do one earlier? Well, I thought I did, but then the great cheeks in the sky opened up and dumped on me.

All summer I was researching and planning on doing my dissertation project on a longitudinal autism neuroimaging study. Well, the data came from UW, and they hadn't finished providing us with all of the scans, etc, etc. Well, late September I find out that only 4 kids from the control group showed up for the follow-up scan. If you know stats, you know that's not so good (our original n was close to 25). So I was like "crap...ok, no worries, I have some back-up research I'm doing at the hospital I could use instead (examining visual memory deficits in traumatic brain injury). Well, as I finished collecting that database together I soon discovered that there were some significant gaps in the data set. "Double crap!" This I discovered Oct 11th, and here I am trying to get a proposal together so I can put it on my applications (the first one is due Nov 1st). Not good. So, basically I'm back to square one, where I was in June.

All is not lost, the Conte Center is letting me use the data set from their first grant to develop an idea. It is going to be in a schizophrenia population, and will likely involve determining the relationship between working memory, executive functioning, and cortical gray matter volume. So now I'm running around trying to meet with people who don't have time to meet with me to get approval. I don't know what I'm doing....

Where am I applying to internship you ask? (from West to East)

University of CA San Diego
U of Arizona
Primary Children's Hospital in SLC
Utah State Hospital
U of New Mexico Health Sciences Center (HSC)
Baylor College of Medicine
Texas Children's Hospital in Houston
U of Chicago
U of Illinois-Chicago
Henry Ford HSC in Detroit
West Virginia HSC
Dartmouth College of Medicine (New Hampshire)
Harvard Medical School/Mass General Hospital
Kennedy Krieger Institute @ Johns Hopkins (Maryland)
U of Florida Gainsville

Any favorites out there?