Science (non) Fiction

I’m finally through with my round of presentations!!!! My thesis committee meeting went decently well on Wednesday, and they’ve passed me on the next level, meaning that come August, I can progress to ‘fifth year’ status - whoa!!!!! How scary is that?!?! It’s so incredible that I’ve reached this point in my graduate school career - as a first year student struggling to make it through classes and choose a lab and learn technical basics and not make a fool of myself, I never really pictured myself this far along in school - it was too far out in the future to picture. Now that I’m here, it’s almost surreal, realizing that in another year or two, I could be finished with school and out in the ‘real world’ finding a job!

Now my work turns to getting some really impressive data in the next couple months, before I have to turn my focus to teaching a lecture at the end of March - which I’m a bit apprehensive about, but very excited at the same time! I mean, this is what I’m hoping to do for the rest of my career, so I’m hoping this will provide some really good experience and a chance to get better with teaching skills - plus a national conference at the end of May where I’ll present a poster of my recent work - a good place for networking and making contacts for future job searches!

All right, enough work/school related stuff - I’ve got a fun weekend planned - a girls afternoon tomorrow, then my brother is coming up to seen me Sat night and staying til Sunday sometime - yay! I haven’t really seen any of my family since the holidays, so it’ll be nice to catch up - we have a lot more fun together now that we’re both adults - I think we’re going to watch Rocky Horror Picture Show (the only time I’ve seen it before was with him too) and eat take-out and have fun! Good times! And I’m still not sure about what I’m doing for the superbowl - I’ve been invited to a couple parties, but we’ll have to see when Matthew has to leave and how dedicated I am to the game…