General Exam Crazyness

It's coming! My Oral Exam is rapidly approaching-- February 10th!

Needless to say, things have been insanely busy. Really. Most days involve waking up to babbling Baby Girl at 7:00am and it doesn't stop til I hit the pillow again that night. Even so, I am making a lot of progress and being productive, which feels great. Proposal is written, revised, and sent out to the committee. This was a ton of work but I've admittedly learned a lot through this whole process of reading and digesting literature. If there is anything to be said about this whole stressful endeavor is that preparing for this exam is incredibly useful (unlike the written exam we work our asses off after our second year, full of knowledge that most of us never use afterwards). Lab work is often routine and monotonous; it's easy to feel like you're not really an 'expert' in anything besides pipetting. In reading so much of the current (and past) literature, I feel like I finally have some ownership over these content areas. Plus, my thesis is now about 2/3 written.

Currently, I'm working on my presentation and analyzing some more experiments I completed a couple weeks ago. I am genuinely interested and -gasp!- excited about the results. They've proven useful for my presentation thus far, so that's a plus.

Woo! Almost there. Seriously cannot wait for this to be over.

Jet lag

Any tips for re-adjusting an infant to their normal time zone after 2 weeks on the East coast (3 hrs ahead of Seattle)?



Any other suggestions?

Baby Girl's been having a tough time of it. She unintentionally adjusted to the East coast schedule; by the time we left she was going to bed around 8PM. Now, she's exhausted by 4:30/5:00 PM here and waking up at strange, frequent intervals. For C and I, this means waking up twice before the final wake up call around 6:30 AM... I feel like we're back to the first month all over again! Exhausting. Hopefully, she'll catch up soon....

I'm Tired and It's Only January 3rd

Happy new year! I hope 2012 is looking bright for everyone, I wish you all good things in the new year.

So far, 2012 is looking to be busy exciting. On the agenda: I have my General Exam scheduled for February 10th! I'm happy to finally have that on the calendar. I've met with each of my committee members individually and have mostly positive vibes coming from them, which is great. Something the whole process did make blatantly clear, however, is that I really should have started meeting with them a whole lot sooner (meaning at least a year before I did...). Outside input-- separate from your advisor-- has proven to be incredibly valuable for both my project and my psyche.

Sadly, for many of us in my program, engaging your committee in your project construction is this nice fairy-tale idea that is not actually encouraged. If anything, one gets the feeling that it's frowned upon until you have a clearer idea of your project.. more "preliminary" data... in my type of lab work, however, by the time you have this data, half your project is completed. Kind of negates the whole idea of having other bright minds contribute to the formation of your project and ability to give you feedback on your PROPOSAL... you know, prosed work? At this stage, it's no longer proposed; it's done. And there's really not a whole lot of time left to change your approach to address concerns from committee members. Perhaps we, as grad students, could be "more proactive," but it seems that even when students try to push, unless your PI is on board and supportive, it's futile.

Anyway, ranting aside, it's scheduled and I can't wait for it to be over! January is looking super busy with experiments and proposal writing/studying for the exam. SOT comes around again in mid March in San Francisco (woo!). The most exciting news: an abstract was accepted for a poster at an international conference in Paris in May!! I'm on a mission to find funding to support my travel, I'm optimistic that I'll finagle something. I've been aiming to go to an international conference, and this one is perfect-- it focuses on environmental stressors in the origins of disease. Plus, it's in Paris :) Wish me luck!