zebrafish summer + letting go

A little less than a month and a half before grad school starts...and the first project will be on zebrafish. Either cell fate determination or stem cells/regeneration, both in the eye. The prof says zebrafish can regain their sight (when blinded with hot copper wire) within a week.

On a totally different note, I had this dream last night, and all the elements in the dream were pointing to a need to purge my old way of thinking and to make a change in my life. I distinctly remember that during the dream I was concerned with an issue outside of grad school, something I've been trying to figure out for the past month.

I guess I'll just have to stop stalling then...

on learning

So I have to make a decision in 11 days as to where I'll be doing lab rotations this summer: it's down to zebrafish v. mice. For background info, both labs gave me a bunch of papers to read. Set 1 is on mouse development, specifically of the pituitary, and set 2 is on the zebrafish eye.

In any case, I've been trying to read these papers (plus a few more I found on fruit fly development), and I understand the gist of them, but unfortunately there are parts that go completely over my head. Basically, I don't know anything. Which makes me wonder... what were the last four years for?

Reading these papers makes me feel so incompetent. :-(

entering the Transition Summer

So... Saturday was graduation and marked the official end of undergrad.

I took my parents and my sister to a departmental reception hosted by the biology department, and made my dad meet several of the people I was /I will be working with. Let's just say he was surprised that I wasn't shy. But you'd think four years of college would change people so they wouldn't be, right? Doesn't college force you out of the shell, if you had one to start with?

There's two months before of start of grad school lab rotations. Two months of freedom. Well, sorta. I'll be in the mol ecol lab until June 30, and leading physics study groups for spring half-term. Then I switch labs on July 1 and start working on fish. Or mice. Need to make a decision in half a month...

Summer is gonna be interesting. Congratulations, class of 2008!

five more years

Here's to five more years of school beyond college. It's 1:13am, and there's so much running through my mind now that graduation is so close. Even though the past four years in itself was a transition, I've named this "The Transition Years" because it marks the brink between getting a college degree and finding a "real" job, which will probably happen... when I'm 30?

Oh, and I chose spots as the background because it reminds me of a microarray. ;-)