I've been meaning to write this post for about two weeks now... first off, I finally decided to stay in this current lab (working with frogs). That doesn't mean I'm not intimidated by my PI; I've gotten a bit used to it, and plus, being a little more intimidated by this PI than the other one would push me to work a little harder and really know what I'm doing.
That being said, I don't think I'll ever get over this "being terrified of my boss" phase. Hopefully by prelim time? If not, it better be by defense time...
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Several weeks ago, one of the professors down the hall was talking about the learning curve in grad school. He said it's pretty amazing how much of a difference one year of grad school makes on a student's reasoning, presenting, and writing skills. It's hard to say where the learning curve is the steepest, but I would guess somewhere in the first two years. I was archiving my rotation presentations and written summaries the other day and before putting them away, I was reading through them. Frankly, my first written summary in grad school sounds like an 8th grader wrote it. :-/
It's gotten easier for me to see the connections between theory and experiment design (something that took me literally forever to do in my undergrad lab), but I still have a ton of stuff to learn. I thought of a possible thesis project about three weeks ago, and talked to my PI about it. There doesn't seem to be too many people working on that particular topic as far as my PubMed searches tell me, but I suppose I could go off on a tangent and search for somewhat related topics...
