I was out of town on Thursday and Friday on a trip up to Olive Branch to the annual Mississippi Academy of Science conference. It was a good time, as usual. This was my third time attending, and I'm sure I'll be going every year for the next five or six years. We were supposed to present our poster for our Trypanosome research, but things got messed up and no judges ended up coming by our poster.
Needless to say, we didn't win any awards. I don't care, but for the sake of the Bio Profs at Belhaven, I wish we had improved on our second-place award from last year. We had a good presentation ready for them, and we knew the material. Oh well, things like that happen. I feel like I've had a decent bit of experience presenting research, and I'm sure that will come in handy in the future.
Before the conference, I had been feeling a bit worried about the graduate/research portion of my future schooling. I still am slightly scared, not knowing what exactly to expect, but the conference did get me excited; I really do like interacting with researchers and hearing about their work. One thing that always amazes me is how much knowledge is out there, concerning pretty much every single subject. I could earn a Ph.D. in physiology, and still know nothing about so many things in the field. I don't know if most researchers struggle with this, but it's hard to see 100 research posters, each about some minute cell or enzyme or channel, and genuinely care about every one of them. I love to learn new things, but I don't have time to learn about everything. Guess I just need to come to grips with the fact that I don't (and won't) know everything, ever.
This summer will be hard. I'm scheduled to do eight, 1-week rotations in the labs of physiology faculty members. I don't know if they expect me to learn many lab techniques in a week. I hope not. If I can get a good grasp of the different types of research going on in the department, I'll be content. I'm fairly certain that I know who I want my advisor to be. He just had an MD/PhD student in his lab for the last three years, so he'll know what to do with me, and his student did quite well. He had several publications, and I believe that two or three of them were as a first author.
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You'd be surprised how much you can learn in one week in a lab. If you do the same things enough times during that week, you might even remember them the next time you need to do them. Kolay gelsin!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad the conference got you "fired up" about your PhD work. You're going to have an amazing summer - and it'll pass so fast that you'll blink and it'll be over. Eight weeks of rotations should certainly give you a decent overview of what's going on in the physio dept.
ReplyDeleteMy professor quoted the following last night "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever" - Ghandi. That truly summed it all up for me. I love to learn, and it's comforting that others feel the same way.