It's very frustrating that the new job hasn't moved forward much in the last week. It got stuck in HR- where everything seems to get stuck around here. But it seems that everything is still on track for me to start on October 1. I'll put in my 2 weeks' notice next Monday. Word has started to spread slowly around the lab. I doubt I'll get any sort of recognition. I think if I had stayed until graduate school, I probably would have gotten some kind of celebratory "good luck in grad school" party. But since I'm leaving for another lab, it's a little different. But I am very VERY excited for the raise! This is going to increase our income by almost $600 a month. That is huge for us. We still need to save $2500 more to reach our goal for our wedding and honeymoon, so in 2 months just that increase will get us halfway there. We have been consistently saving about $600 a month on my current salary, so if we continue with that trend it looks like we'll just make it. What a relief! I think it is very encouraging that we can live on my $25k salary and still have over $500 left to put in savings. That means that when Daniel starts working full-time, we will be able to save a lot more. And for a while, every extra penny will go towards student loans. After our honeymoon, of course :-)
Last week I started auditing a course here on campus on basic immunology. The only immunology I have learned has been picked up little by little as I do research in the lab. After 2 classes, so many holes have been filled that help me understand the research so much better. I hope I will be able to continue taking the class after I move to the new lab. The professor is absolutely incredible. It's obvious he's a very visual person because he explains everything through drawings or acting things out in class. It's very amusing when he uses people in the class as props. I love this because I'm a visual person too. Giving human personalities, emotions, and motivations to things like antibodies and T-cells makes everything so much easier to understand and remember. One of my favorite things in the world is learning something new, and having a fantastic professor to teach me makes it even better. Every day I am reaffirmed in my fascination with the human body. I am a born scientist. Third generation, in fact!
Work has been inordinately frustrating lately. I have been running a million qPCRs and every third time the instrument fails in some way and I have to repeat the experiment. It takes about half a day to do each plate, so when one fails that's half a day completely wasted. And the reagents and materials to run one plate cost a couple thousand dollars. That's not much in science terms, but it's still waste. The most frustrating part is that I always feel like it's my fault. Even when the instrument fails I feel like it's my fault.
Yesterday was my first day of not going to school. To me it still feels like summer break. I wonder when it will hit me that everyone else is in school and I'm not. Maybe when it starts to get cold. I am loving what I'm doing right now. Compared to school, working feels so completely productive. I actually get paid for working 40 hours a week, instead of paying thousands of dollars to work 60 hours a week. I have more free time than I ever did in school and less stress too. Although, I can't imagine having kids and working full-time. I think it would feel like I never see them. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
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