Science (non) Fiction

So, it’s official. I have been granted my Doctor of Philosophy degree in Microbiology and Immunology from Wake Forest University! I am a real doctor, though not the kind that help people. I will officially be a December 2008 graduate (missed the August deadline by 2 weeks!), though I won’t walk in graduation and be hooded until May 2009. But the degree is finished, and it feels like an enormous weight has been lifted from my shoulders in the last 24 hours.

I will now be making some revisions of the thesis document, and finishing up some experiments, and breaking into my new role as professor. I want to thank those of you who have been such an incredible source of support and comfort over the past several years, who have listened to the complaining and freaking out and stressful conversations, who have prayed for me over the years and lightened the load. This experience would have been much less fun and incredibly more difficult without all of you. So thank you. Very much.

With the roomie defending her thesis this Monday, we decided to have a big blow-out party next Saturday the 23rd at 2pm. If you haven’t gotten an invitation and want to come, let me know and I’ll add you to the list! We’d love to see you there!

So. I have been delaying updating here until I could say something real. And I now can. I will be defending my PhD dissertation this coming Thursday August 14th at 2pm, starting with an open seminar (feel free to come if you’d like!) and then a closed session with my thesis committee. I don’t think I can accurately describe what it feels like to be here, finally at this point I’ve been striving for for 6 years. It’s been a long time coming, and yet sometimes seems to have flown by at warp speed. There’s a strong sense of inevitability now that it’s less than a week away, now that the countdown has begun. I’m also nervous, and proud, and amazed, and exhausted, and a million other things right now. I will be beyond happy to receive my PhD, but also I suspect will feel an intense sense of relief, that this time of constant questioning will be over.

As far as details go, I will be sticking around Winston Salem for this coming academic year. I’ll be working in the lab through the end of September to finish up a couple more papers before the boss leaves. But starting on August 18th, I’ll be teaching my first college class at a local liberal arts college, an introductory class for biology majors. I am very excited (and nervous) about this new opportunity, and the experience it will bring that will make me a more attractive candidate for a faculty position in the near future.

So. There you go. An update, finally. I will try to keep up better now that the big news is out, but given what September is looking like, that might be a tall order. We’ll see. I’ll be sure to let you know how things go this week. Unless the biochemistry kills me first.

Just some good things happening in my life right now (or now-ish):

~ Good, deep conversations with friends about important (and some not-so-important) things

~ Knowing that going to see WICKED is only ONE MONTH AWAY!!!!! (SO excited!)

~ When experiments actually work correctly reproducibly, and move my work forward instead of backwards

~ The fact that LOST and How I Met Your Mother is back on TV regularly, and many of my other favorites will be back shortly (April 10th for The Office!)

~ Broadway musical soundtracks (Lately it’s been old favorites that I’m revisiting like Les Mis and Into the Woods, plus Wicked of course)

~ Long, fun voicemail messages from friends and family about cat’s brains or cute coworkers

~ The fact that my birthday is exactly two weeks away!

I will not post the accompanying crappy things that are going on, as the good things generally outweigh them right now.

So what’s going well in your life right now?

OK, I know it’s been forever since I’ve posted. I kept waiting and waiting and waiting til I had some solid answers about the future, but as it seems my life will stay in a state of semi-chaos for a while longer, I figure it’s time to catch y’all up with the goings-on.

First of all, in case you’ve forgotten, in my absence, what I look like:

And, even though I posted since then, I don’t think I’ve actually said that Rebecca and I have moved into a cute little house in Ardmore just over a mile from school and less than that from church:

We love it - it’s been really nice to be close to school again (not that I was that far before, but it’s still nice to be closer), and to have enough space to have people over regularly (despite having a couple issues with neighbors), and Dinah appreciates having more people to regularly love her.

Also, this has been my life recently:

I’ve been running gels like mad, trying to get things wrapped up so I can finish this thesis and graduate in the near future - for those counting, it will likely be either May or June, so stay tuned in for the last-minute thesis issues that I’m sure will be coming along shortly. I’m looking for jobs in the area, as I’d love to stay here, but I might end up looking farther afield, but still in the state at least. Let me know if you hear of any good teaching jobs (preferably small, liberal arts colleges, but I can be flexible).

The brother is still doing well out in Cali:

Well, he doesn’t look like he’s doing well there, but he just wasn’t pleased with all of my picture-taking at Christmas. He’s working at Sony, doing some writing, and looking for a good production job now that things are gearing back up after the strike. Dad got to fly out and visit him this past week, so I’m very jealous. Maybe when I have a real, grown-up job…

Mom is still adjusting to her new job and schedule - and she and Dad are having to make some tough decisions in the next little bit. I’m going home tonight to celebrate Dad’s belated birthday, so that will be good.

Hopefully I can keep this more updated than it’s been lately - entering the home stretch may make that difficult, but I will try.

I finished Carolyn Parkhurst’s Lost and Found over the weekend, which keeps me on track (for now at least) for reading about a book a week (3 so far in 2007). I updated my list to include my opinion of the book (very good). My plan is to finish up both The Pact and A Circle of Quiet this weekend.
Also on tap for this weekend is my lab’s yearly retreat to the mountains of Virginia an hour north of Winston. Unfortunately, there are too many things going on this time of year, so I’m actually going up after everyone else on Saturday morning (they’re all leaving Friday afternoon), but that’s ok because I’m going to see Sandra McCracken play at the Garage!!!!! Yay! Friday night, 9pm, The Garage, Winston Salem. Everyone should come!
In other news, I’m getting my hair cut tomorrow. I’m thinking about changing things up - any ideas from y’all? I don’t really want to change just to have something different, but I’m getting a little tired of how it is now… we’ll see, I’m sure Cheryl will come up with something amazing that I would have never thought of.

So I haven’t really posted in a while, mostly cause I feel kinda … scattered? about what to write for now. Things have been really busy in the lab and elsewhere since the holidays, which has pushed me right back into the hectic schedule I was doing before Christmas. Which is fine, it just means less time for reflective blogging, so y’all are going to get the abbreviated version of my thoughts

Christmas at home was great - lots of time with family, including my maternal grandmother, who stayed for about 2 weeks. We made (and ate) a lot of yummy food, attempted a HUGE puzzle (that was abandoned), watched a few movies, read a LOT. So it was very relaxing and restful. Got some great stuff, including some lovely sheets that are on my bed right now and some cool new music.

Since then:
I’ve started back to work. Work is…ok. My boss and I had a random conversation yesterday about my graduation timeframe, and I think we both agree that May is too early to get everything done, but that we’re both aiming for roughly this coming fall - so that’s good, and scary at the same time. I’ve got a departmental seminar to give, a possible talk at a large meeting, and a thesis committee meeting, all of which will happen in February. Not. cool. But the committee meeting at least does have to happen so we can figure out what they want to see me finish before I graduate, since that’s what I need to be focused on to finish up here.
I still need to get some teaching experience before I get a ‘real’ job, but I’m leaning a lot more towards taking a semester or two off after I graduate and teaching as an adjunct prof at one of the close-by colleges. I just can’t see myself being able to maintain my research load, while doing a good job at teaching and maintaining a healthy, sane personal life, so I think that might be the best, if not most time-efficient, solution. Plus it means I might not have to pick up and leave Winston quite so soon
Other, less important things - I’m gearing up for training for the Cooper River Bridge March 31st - I had initially wanted to run the whole thing (after running about 1/2-2/3 of it last year), but with my knee being wierd still, I’m just hoping to do at least what I did last year. So far, so good. And I’m really looking forward to that weekend - Becky found a great house that holds a ton of people, so we’ll be able to really spread out and enjoy ourselves!
I sold a bunch of my books (ones that I won’t evey re-read really) to Edward McKays last night (LOVE EdMcKays!) - I got $40 store credit, of which I quickly spent $25 on some CDs (CC’s Share the Well, Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash) and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, of which I’ve read parts, but now I can read the whole thing (my high school obsession with mythology rears it’s ugly head!).
Speaking of reading, I’ve been reading a lot since Christmastime - I read at least a couple books over the holiday week break at home, and I’ve been making an effort to read more in the evenings rather than watching stupid tv that just happens to be on at the time. I read Dogs of Babel, and I’ve now moved on to reading several books at the same time (which is probably not the best way to get through things, but I get bored reading only one book sometimes, especially non-fiction). I’m still working on Freddy and Fredericka and The Pact, but I’m really absorbed in Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (thank you Kari!), who was the New York Times restaurant critic in the 1990s (I think the 90s) - she has really great stories about the lengths she had to go to to write her reviews. I should be finishing at least one or two of those this weekend…

I’m hanging out with some friends this weekend, celebrating Alisa’s birthday with dinner out tonight (at Bianca’s, yum!) and casual girl-time tomorrow - should be a lot of fun! So Happy Birthday Alisa - hope this year in NC proves to be even better than the last!

My paper has finally made it through all the red tape of publishing, and is now officially ‘in print’ in the Journal of Bacteriology!!! Go here to read the abstract, or the whole paper if you have a subscription to JB (as I’m sure so many of you do ).
I came in this morning to lab to see a copy on my desk, which is the signal from my boss that someone in the lab has gotten a paper published - still seems a bit surreal for it to be my name on the paper, and not some older student’s - and then I realize, with a horrified gasp, that I *am* that ‘older student’ - gah! Oh well, one more step on my way out the door with my degree…

That’s right, the Wake Forest Demon Deacons have won their first ACC Championship since 1970 against Georgia Tech with a score of 9-6!!! They’ve had an awesome season, and the students here are PUMPED about seeing their team play in the Orange Bowl in less than a month. My boss (and his sophomore WFU son) were at the championship game in Jacksonville and he said it was awesome to see it in person - I figured his son might have talked him into trying to go to the Orange Bowl, but no dice apparently.

So things are finally starting to turn around for me in lab - I’ve been having mucho trouble with one experiment especially, and it was giving me fits trying to get it to work. I finally backed WAY up and tried something really simple, and it gave me the answers I needed to actually do the experiment! yessss. So again, I go back to my admonition that graduate school is much less about innate intelligence, and WAY more about persistence. And I also was finally successful in getting another tough experiment to work, this one more about just doing it enough times that success was inevitable.

Other good things in my life currently:

Messiah rehearsals started this past Sunday afternoon, and our second rehearsal is tonight - it looks (and sounds) like it’s going to be an awesome year - we’ve got a big group, and even the sopranos are doing really well More on this coming later as I process the enormity of performing such an incredible piece of music, especially given the message of the music.

Beach trip this weekend! My Bible study group is going to Ocean Isle this weekend, to the same house we rented last year - if it’s anything like last year, it should be a really good time of hanging out with friends and getting to know some of the ‘newer’ people, plus it’s supposed to be in the 70s all weekend

New Gilmore Girls AND House MD epsisodes tonight!!!!! Honestly, they’re the two shows I’m most excited about each week in general, even if I’ll only be able to tape them and have to watch them sometime later…

Oh, and I voted today - with, I think, the entire population of Winston over the age of 65, which made my voting time much longer than necessary, but still worth it - apparently, I need to move to a younger, hipper area of town so I can vote with people my age (and speed) - hehe.

I stopped in at Becky’s last night to say hi to people on my way back from being in Charlotte for the weekend - ended up staying entirely too late, and when I went to look for my key, I couldn’t find it. Now normally, this isn’t a huge deal, cause there’s only a small numbers of places my keys can usually hide, as I have tons of keys, membership cards and pepperspray all on my keychain. But since I had the car in the shop this week, I’d separated the car key and clicker from the rest of my keys and hadn’t put them back together. So I walked into Becky’s house with just the car key and my (new) cell phone, and now the key is missing! We searched the entire downstairs for about 30 minutes (under the sofa, under the cushions, in the trash, everywhere) before finally giving up and Becky drove me to the lab, where I had to sneak into the hospital (no badge, cause everything, including my purse, was in the car) and use the spare key to get into the lab, where my only spare car key is located. Luckily, I found it, and could get back into my car and get the rest of my keys to get into my apartment. So I have to head over to Becky’s at some point and see if I can find my real set of keys someplace where we didn’t look before… I’m kinda hoping somebody who left before me took them without realizing it and will promptly call me to return them…

So add this to the list of ways graduate school is continuing to make me crazier than I was before I started (I think I already told you about losing my car again a couple weeks ago - seriously, I almost had to call security, cause I had no idea which level I was even parked on). There’s apparently a physical limit to how much information I can retain in my brain, and every time I push some more microbiology in there, some other important ‘life skills’ stuff falls out the other side - I don’t know how I’m going to be able to function as a PhD.