Tag: grad school

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Andy’s a teacher?!

So, I got my first taste of teaching recently… As I may have explained before, the Pharmacological and Physiological Science Department at SLU (of which I’m a member…) runs a class for undergrad non-science majors every Fall titled “Drugs We Use And Abuse.” It accepts 50 students a semester and tends to be pretty popular, mostly because instead of learning basic biological principles, you learn more about specific drugs and their effects on people and society.

This is my first time teaching the class, and teaching in any form for that matter… I got to teach the Alcohol section, which consisted of two lectures, the first of which was Alcohol and the Body (i.e. mechanisms and physiological effects) and the second was Alcohol and Society (i.e. alcohol on campus, alcoholism, Prohibition, etc.). The first lecture was infinitely more interesting for me, and for the students too, I think. I talked about how alcohol works on the body and had a decent number of questions… The stuff today was pretty straight-forward and largely consisted of things the students already knew (as in, heavy alcohol use tends to lead to drunk driving, violence, skipping school, etc.).

So yeah, I think I enjoyed the experience overall. I had to write a quiz for my section, then wrote a few exam questions that will be administered in a week or so. Perhaps next year I’ll expand a bit and run more of the class, and more lectures. It’s team-taught, meaning that we each get a section to work on and all contribute to the exam for each section.

Regardless, I’m still planning on the “going into industry” route after graduation (in three years…), but teaching wasn’t bad! Maybe I’ll get more into it later on? Who knows…

More and more craziness, I say…being on the other side of the desk for once… 😛

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A good weekend for one and all…

…well, hopefully… 😛

So yeah, Yanela was out of town at church this weekend (our Worship Leader), so I got to run the show this weekend…and as I got to be in charge, I got to recruit the people I wanted to…and Mom and Kristen got the call (Dad, you would have too, but you don’t play the recorder all that well…sorry! ;-)). Brooke played bass (of course), I played guitar, Mom played piano and Kristen sang. We did some old songs and some new ones, all of which seemed to turn out pretty well! Thanks, family!!

Otherwise, Mom and Dad left on Sunday (after a lovely brunch at Norton’s…great place…we should go again sometime…), and then Kristen, Brooke and I tried going to Fast Eddie’s in Alton, IL. This place, apparently, Alton Brown went to in his “Feasting on Asphalt” show on the Food Network. Well, they’ve got really cheap eats and a nifty biker atmosphere (where I don’t exactly fit in, needless to say…). And, they were rather packed. As in, not a seat available in the house. And a long line for food. And lines of people watching for empty tables. We ended up leaving, unfortunately, so we’ll have to try going back some other time. We ended up just going to Joanie’s (after we tried going to Ferraro’s Pizza…which wasn’t open, dammit…).

We went to the zoo the next morning, saw the penguins (w00t!), and then Kristen went home… And today, of course, we’re back to the real world…

Guess I’d better prepare my lecture for this Friday… I’ve gotta shape young minds!

Edit: Oh yeah, and by the way, the Kansas City Royals have a better record than 9 other teams in Major League Baseball. Just wanted to throw that out there…. 😛

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Craziness…

Yeah, this past week got pretty nuts at work/school… While I’m not taking classes, per se, I’m still required to get a few things done…namely, my Prelim… At this rate, I need to have the 8-page treatment done by mid-October so it can be approved before doing the 25-page version for mid-November. After it’s approved, I can do my Oral Defense in early/mid-December and life will be good. I chatted with Dr. Macarthur earlier in the week about where I stand thus far and I think I’m in decent shape, but there’s a lot of research to do.

This process is different from a more classical undergrad “research paper” in that there’s a lot more critical thinking involved. You have to determine whether your science is sound, whether there is evidence to support the ideas you’re putting forward, and whether they’re even do-able experiments. At Truman, all I had to do was look up a subject and write about it – there wasn’t very much “opinion” needed… Now, theoretically, my opinion matters and I have to defend it on paper…and then to five professors… So yeah, while 8 pages doesn’t sound all that hard, there’s a lot of thought that goes into it…that I need to really get started on.

That, and I’ve got two lectures to deliver, one on September 7th and one on September 10th…both on alcohol (I know…no first-hand experience there, right?). I’ve got last year’s PowerPoint presentations to start from, but I’ve still got to update them a bit and learn the material before the 7th. I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on the science that goes into it, but some refreshing would be useful…

On top of both those things, Dr. Macarthur wants me to start putting together all my data from the last year (plus a bit more…) so it can be published. I’ve got some decent data, but there’s a little more I’d like to get… I really need to get started on the Prelim, though, so I’ll likely shut down all experiments for a few weeks while I get started, then fire them back up toward the end of September. That way, I can do additions to my Prelim (’cause it’ll already be pretty far along) and I won’t have lectures to accomplish anymore… If all goes well, I should be able to get a paper done for publication by the end of the year, and that’d be sweet to get a paper out already, ’cause I’ve still got a few years left…

Anyone else busy already? The school year has barely started!!

Shenanigans, I tell you…

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Quotes and Links…

On my iGoogle page this morning, the following was my link of the day…and I enjoyed it:

“Equations are the devil’s sentences.”
– Stephen Colbert

On another note, Zachary Quinto will be playing Spock in the new “Star Trek” movie that J.J. Abrams is producing/writing/directing… Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I mean, I think the guy, with the proper hair, could look the part, and I know he can do “unemotional acting,” but the character he plays in “Heroes” is Sylar…and that guy is evil. There are certain actors that just seem to play good “bad guys,” and it’s hard to imagine their transition to a “good guy” role. I’ve heard they’re envisioning a trilogy for these “Star Trek” movies, assuming this one does well enough, meaning that this guy could be playing Spock for years to come, but still…I just dunno…

In other news, my boss is still out of town, so I’ll be going home early today…maybe play some “Super Mario World” and “Resident Evil 4,” but I also need to get started writing my Prelim. This document will be a 25-page grant that I have to defend in order to “officially enter the doctoral program” here at SLU, so it’s kinda a big deal. I generally know what I’m writing it on, but it’s a little hard getting the ball rolling. I hope to defend in November/December, so I’ve still got time – that, and I don’t have classes to take anymore, so there isn’t much getting in the way of the writing…

…I just need to get started…that’s all…

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Strange days…

“Times, they are a changin’,” says Bob Dylan… Not that things are drastically different right now from where they were a month ago, but school has certainly shifted to a different “chapter,” so to speak… As of a few weeks ago, I have no classes to attend anymore in graduate school, so I’m working completely on research now. Really, I’ve just been spending the last two weeks getting in to all the literature on the subject(s) I’m investigating, getting papers from the last few years and as far back as 1948…

I guess it’s just that it’s going to be weird getting used to not being spoon-fed information anymore. It’s not like I can go to a textbook for this stuff, or go to a few lectures on a general subject and take an exam after you learn the material… Nope, now it’s reading directly from the fringes of all scientific knowledge, sifting through hundreds of papers and data to try and decide what information to focus on, and what to set aside… It’s just a different kind of learning, a kind that I’m not terribly used to…yet… Kinda like solving a puzzle, really, in that you run across various pieces that you have to fit together. If they fit, you win a Ph.D… 😛

Anyway, life is good, otherwise. We’ve got three weddings to attend in June (let alone our own anniversary…), and we’ll probably spend a little vacation time up in Minnesota while we go to one of them, but that mostly takes care of the weddings for the summer. We’ve gotta figure out what to do with Edie for a few of those weddings, but I’m sure there are plenty of people that’d be willing to watch her (hint, hint…).

Onward, summer!

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Good weekend…

This was one of the better weekends I’ve had in awhile, largely because the weather was stellar and we didn’t spend it sitting around watching TV (or studying) like usual… We drove down to Ste. Genevieve for the day on Saturday to do some wine tasting from two different wineries and look at some of the historic sites. The Cave Vineyards winery was especially neat ’cause, as the name suggests, they’ve got a cave that you can sit in and enjoy your wine and picnic lunch. Neither Brooke nor I consider ourselves to be “aficionados” or anything, but the wine was decent…certainly, the atmosphere made it worth the trip. They apparently do live music on weekends beginning in May and occasionally host “dinner and a movie” in the cave over summer as well.

Regardless, we had church Sunday morning and then spent the afternoon getting the bikes out and ready to go for another season. As we don’t particularly enjoy driving to St. Charles to hop on the Katy Trail, we tried out the St. Louis Riverfront Trail, which is thankfully within biking distance of our apartment. It’s about 11 mi long (plus a few miles to get there), and we certainly didn’t do all of it, but it was nice to get out and enjoy the day and explore a bit of the area around our place, now that the weather is cooperating.

Of course, the weekend was especially good because my final was on Friday, leaving me with absolutely no school work to accomplish over the weekend (first time in awhile!). It “only” took me 5 hours this time (instead of 6 hours, like last semester), and the exam wasn’t entirely unreasonable…but regardless, the semester is officially over for me. Not only the semester, really, but also the sum of all classwork required for the Ph.D. program. Now, I’ve gotta buckle down and write a grant that follows along the lines of my research plans, then defend it, by the end of 2007.

Ready? Set? Go!

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A learning experience…

So, last week was a bit busy trying to work with my first poster presentation of my research.  The way conferences work, you typically make a 4′ x 5′ poster that summarizes the background behind what you’re doing, and then presents data that you can then describe to passers-by.  This is a way at conferences to get your data out there without having to have everyone do a 15 min presentation (although, that’s an option, too).  Tends to be very informal and is an excellent way to get started.

Anyway, the Graduate Student Association (GSA) at SLU holds a Graduate Research Symposium once a year where they have everyone submit posters and abstracts to you can present your data to your fellow classmates, and also get them judged by professors at the school.  From my perspective, this is an excellent opportunity to get experience before the Neuroscience meeting in November (in San Diego!), which will be my first real meeting.  The cool thing about that experience, as compared with the GSA symposium, is that those people will be quite familiar with the basics of the research field, while some of the judges at the symposium yesterday were from the social sciences department, requiring you to define “neuron” or “oxidative stress” to them.  60 students presented posters yesterday for a good three hours and most of the people coming by were professors, rather than students, but that’s to be expected, I guess.

Anyway, I think I did a decent job, overall…certainly for a first-timer.  The data I had wasn’t terribly involved compared with other students there, and I’m not even sure I explained it all in the best way either, but regardless, I felt it helped me out in the long-run.

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The Extent of Education

I’m not really sure what made me think about it today, but my head was spinning around the idea of education and the process of learning. You start out in primary school learning the absolute basics, and things get a bit more complicated in high school. At the end of high school, you decide what interests you and what you want for a career. Let’s say you want to learn about cancer…

Well, then you go to the Harvard of the Midwest and you get a biology degree, taking classes that will teach you about general science, but also a little bit about cancer. Assuming you still love cancer (well, learning about it…), then you go to graduate school to concentrate only on cancer…

…here’s the dicey part… Eventually, you reach the end of education…as in…all education as you’ve known it for the previous 20 years… Because now, you realize that, hey, this stuff I’m learning isn’t in textbooks. The answers to a given question aren’t so easy to look up and find anymore… You can’t ask your parents or teacher a question and have them reply: “why don’t you go look it up?”

Why is this? Because no one knows… By the time you hit graduate school, you’re really hitting the “nitty gritty” of the extent of all human knowledge in that specific subject that you were interested in back in late-high school. There is no more that you can learn from a person, a textbook, or even a primary research article… That’s it.

I dunno…it’s just kinda weird knowing that you could be asked a question and it isn’t simply a issue of not knowing the answer: it’s not knowing the answer because the answer hasn’t been discovered yet by anyone on Earth. Once in graduate school, you’re really at the “final frontier” (insert Star Trek reference here…) of human knowledge on a given subject. So when you’re called an “expert on cancer,” it’s really true because you’ve learned just about 95-99% of everything that can be learned about it.

These are the thoughts I have when studying for exams… 😛

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Busy, busy…

The past few weeks have been rather hectic… I start up class (finally…) this coming Monday, so I’ve been trying to get quite a few experiments done between Xmas and now… On the plus side, we’re going to be learning some hardcore neuroscience in the last half of the semester, and I’m all about that…

The rather frightening part is that I’ve reached a point in my career thus far where I don’t want to go to class…not because I don’t want to learn, but because I’d rather spend time in the lab working on new science. I really don’t mind going to class, but it takes two hours out of my day, four days a week…time that could be better spent starting an experiment that has a six hour incubation time… I still see the need to learn more, in order to become a better physiologist, but at the same time, I guess I’d rather investigate my own avenues and interest…

I guess it’s just kinda weird having experienced true lab work over the past few months, and wanting to continue it, rather than go to class…as opposed to sitting on my ass watching TV, rather than go to class…

I hate growing up…sigh…

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Merry Christmas

Well, it’s been a long two weeks, yo… Quick recap:

a). I took a 5.5 hour final two weeks ago. I found out this week that we all passed. Therefore, I don’t have to take it again in a few weeks… 😛 Therefore, I don’t have class until January 29th and I’ll be trying to get some work done in the lab while I don’t have studying to deal with…

b). We are almost moved in to our new place in Soulard (just south of downtown St. Louis) and we’re very excited about it! There are plenty of restaurants/bars in the area, we have much more room now, and we have a washer/dryer so we don’t have to go through quarters nearly as quickly. Our lease is up at the old place on the 31st, so we’re just trying to get things cleaned up over there, but almost everything is out. Anyway, come visit sometime… For New Years’ Eve, perhaps? We’ll have pics up of the new place once we get everything settled in their proper places…it’s still kinda a mess right now, but we’re making it…

c). Arie, Jeff and I went to Jason Mallory’s wedding in Louisville, KY over the past few days. Check out a few pictures here.

d). I’m planning on chilling in Columbia this week between Wednesday and Friday. If you’re around, gimme a call (although, my cell phone has been acting up recently, so be patient if you don’t get through…).

I guess that’s about it. Anyway, it’s been nuts for the past few weeks. I’m looking forward to a break soon, yo…

Regardless, merry Christmas and happy New Year…or whatever you celebrate this time of year!