I found out last week that I am finally going to be published! As a scientist, publishing articles in a scientific journal is how most people measure their success. The more they publish, and the better the journal they publish in, the more prestige (and therefore grant money/salary) they get. I have been working in this lab for almost 2 years and I have worked extensively on 3 or 4 projects, and one of them is finally being sent off to the journal at the end of this week! I had to sign a bunch of paperwork disclosing any conflict of interest and giving all copyright rights to the journal. Ironically, this first paper is one that I have only been working on for the last few weeks. I completed the last bit of work that needed to be done before we could submit the manuscript. It's a fascinating paper. Once it's published, I can write all about it. Until then, I can only say that it involved human subjects with different forms of interstitial idiopathic pneumonia and aimed to find genetic markers in their lung tissue that could predict what subtype they have, their prognosis, and how they will respond to different treatments. I am pretty sure that in the next year or so, I will continue to be published in this lab for the work I have already completed. And my new lab has promised me at least 2 publications, hopefully more. I just wish that one of them would have been finished in time for me to put it on my graduate school application. That would give me a great advantage over many of my co-applicants.
Speaking of grad school, I still haven't heard anything :-( I fully expected to hear something from them by now. The early deadline was September 1, and I submitted mine in mid-July. The final deadline is October 1, so maybe they're waiting until then to contact anyone. I applied to 3 schools and I will be extremely surprised if I don't get an interview at one of them. I'm starting to get discouraged. It's hard to stay positive, but still brace myself for disappointment at the same time. It helps that if I don't get into graduate school, I'm still very excited about our alternate plan. Which involves me continuing to work in the job that I love, and start having babies. Not a bad Plan B, right?
But first, I have a wedding to attend. We got our first 2 RSVPs in the mail on Saturday. About once a day I have a moment of extreme excitement and then I come back down to earth and remember that I have a lot of things to do between now and then. As it gets closer, I am also getting more excited about those 10 days after the wedding that we will be spending in Hawaii! Right now the ocean, beaches, volcano, and snorkeling sound very nice. And I imagine that 6 weeks from now, when it's 30 degrees and snowing outside, it will sound even better. (side note, it's 80 degrees outside right now, I can't believe in 6 weeks it will be full on winter!) One of my co-workers, an MD in our lab, told me that her parents own a snorkeling charter company out of Kona, the capital of the Big Island and she offered to set me up a trip with them. Last week she emailed me a confirmation for our trip and a link to the website. It looks amazing! The trip is 4.5 hours and includes breakfast and lunch. We go out snorkeling to a site where they see dolphins almost every day, and once out of every week and a half the dolphins stay to swim with the snorkelers! It's also whale season in Hawaii, so we could see humpback whales. The boat also has a diving platform and water slide. Oh, and did I mention a fully stocked cash bar? I think I'll be bringing some cash along for some post-snorkeling drinks. And it's completely free to us too! We will be sending a nice thank you note to my co-worker for that. I looked up the company in our guidebook and it got fantastic reviews. Daniel also decided that he wants to take golf lessons. So now the plan is for us to spend a day at a resort on the Kohala coast. Daniel can learn to play golf, and I will be happy to spend the day at the spa. Daniel isn't really into massages, and I'm certainly not into golf, so I think spending a few hours away from each other on our honeymoon is okay.
I should stop wasting time and get back to my science. Last week in my old lab :-(
No comments:
Post a Comment