summer

I love it when it is summer, even if I don't get outside as much as I would like. My good friend defended his thesis today and I'm very sad he is leaving. I don't really see him that much as we works from home a lot, but we started in the same year so I'm sad to see him go. I am happy that he has found a kick ass post-doc job for a research institute which pays much more than the NIH standard and he will be moving closer to his girlfriend too. Happy trails M!

We are taking on an undergrad student from Puerto Rico for the summer. She arrived this week, so now I get to train her so she 'has the experience' of what research is like. Then I get to give her my data, analyze it, explain it and make a poster for her. I feel sort of bad that she can't do her own project but it is physically impossible to have her collect actual data that would be usable in two months time. I had a student a couple of years ago from the Utah who I did not enjoy working with. She seems to have a much better attitude so far so I'm happy for that. I do hope that I can have her do some fun things and interact with the animals and run some sessions with other projects that allows her to see what is like to work with them. I also have a lot of tedious not so fun stuff she can do, but I suppose learning about research means realizing not all of it is the "fun stuff". While I enjoy exposing people to research and hopefully showing it is interesting, I do not enjoy the fact that I will have to waste valuable parts of my day training her to do things, and then she will leave never to actually perform those tasks in a helpful productive way. bleh. I'm still frantically trying to collect enough data to leave this place and I have a lot of analysis and writing to do. I'm also going to a Matlab camp this month. One of our guy graduate students is going too, and that was it originally, but then my PI agreed to let me go too. Yay!