here it is, a blog about my scientific life and other related things. my hope for this whole adventure is to commune with other science people and convey the day-to-day of the lovely lifestyle they call grad school.

i sit here today contemplating the last 4 years of my life and how i haven’t even been able to keep track of the time as grad school flew by at breakneck speed. now i begin year 5 and what i hope to be the final study in my dissertation research. i cross my fingers that my committee will be satisfied by this proposal…

i came into this whole thing knowing, but not really comprehending, what a tremendous task grad school would be. i don’t think you can really understand it until you’ve been through the wringer, and the department and university i chose just happen be very effective at putting us through it slowly and painfully. now that i am by several years the senior graduate student in my lab, it becomes my job to informally guide the younger students through the realization that grad school is a marathon that only ends far after you have become ready for it to end.

myself, i am mentally ready to move on. i am ready to go home, to be closer to my family who i left half a country away and can only afford to visit annually. i am ready to leave this climate behind and return to a place where my activity patterns more closely match one’s ability to be outdoors. but i have a ways to go yet, and so i continue on in my pursuit of something nobody in my family has ever dreamed of doing.

the following will be bits and pieces of my day to day experience. it might take me a while to get into a regular pattern, but i will be trying between running IF staining on my free-floating sections and writing documents.