Life has moved at a strange pace since coming back from Europe a couple of weeks ago. Weird schedules, moving and unpacking and organizing, getting ready for upcoming projects and tying up loose ends of past ones. Thankfully I'm getting out of this weird transition zone soon and will be back into a normal work and life routine.
On Thursday I had my first committee meeting since my qualifying exam. I really like my committee members and feel like the meetings are not extremely intimidating and always end with some good feedback. Everyone is pretty happy with my progress made thus far and are helpful in pointing out flaws or places that need improvement. I'm thankful to have one committee member with an expertise beyond what my advisor and I have who keeps me motivated to stay on top of that literature and another who's helping me out with field work next week (and who I also keep running into during my swim workouts, hahaha!)
Perhaps most importantly, I have a really helpful and understanding advisor who's given lots of great feedback and continues to steer me in the right direction. And early next week she's helping me take the big step of getting my first manuscript submitted. I'm glad it's finally in a polished state (well, after Sunday afternoon it definitely will be) that's ready for submittal. The process is a bit complicated because there's a lot of supporting documents you need so we're going to walk through it on Monday. Nervous but excited!!
And while this summer will be kind of a crazy one as I start the last two projects for my dissertation project, I'm glad that I'll have some help from a new undergraduate student starting in our lab. He's a very motivated and eager to learn pre-med sophomore. I'm going to start him off with some basic techniques (pipetting, labeling tubes, etc) and then see how he performs with some of our more complicated tasks. Sometimes bringing in an undergraduate can be tough but I think the timing is perfect, since I'll have a lot to show him but also a lot that he can do as well. He's thinking about medical school but was pretty excited about working in a lab setting. Then when I was showing him around the fish facility he even told me "You do know you have the coolest job, right?" Sometimes I really don't know what to think about my job since sometimes I tell people what I do and they reply "Wow, you're really mean to those fish!" but I'm glad at least one person thinks it's cool!
Time to start off with my former normal weekend routine: biking this morning, cleaning this afternoon (amidst moving and traveling and rearranging stuff my place is in disarray). maybe a downtown bar tonight, then some church and a trip to the coffee shop to do some writing tomorrow.
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