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.
Awesome! Good luck!
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