Steamed Puddings

I realized while trying to fall asleep tonight that I cannot pinpoint the time at which I decided to go to graduate school. I must have been in the foggy final years of my bachelor’s degrees when I surely decided that pursuing an MS or a PhD was a fine way to avoid life for a few more years.

I went through several other career phases during college:

• I was briefly pre-med and talked to the Air Force about paying for my medical education. During this time I volunteered at the pharmacy at the local Air Force base, and at the emergency room in now-defunct Tucson General Hospital.
• I wanted to do pharmacology research. I took elective classes in med chem/pharmacology and human physiology late in my degree program, but didn’t do as well as I expected and wisely decided not to go this route. (Interestingly, my Human Phys textbook is one of my most useful resources now that I am doing research on human health.)
• I thought about law school…

It seems like the only major post-graduate program I didn’t consider earlier in life was the MBA. Now that I have been exposed to the four MBA students currently visiting my company, I think I could do it - though I am certainly not aching to go back to school anytime soon. Whether I ever want to do an MBA is another decision entirely.

For the moment, I am pretty happy as a “postdoc” (at a private research institution) and I’m being asked to do a lot more project management. This makes me happy.

The hobbies are still continuing to take up time. Coworkers have seen me knitting a dishcloth at teatimes this week. I finished it this evening and started a different dishcloth design. There is no word yet on my thesis, and it has been nearly two weeks since I submitted it to CSO and Placentologist.

Next week I am off to a proteomics conference in Australia. Apparently this is a pretty relaxing, fun conference. It lasts only four days. I’m staying in my own room at the conference venue (nice!) and I fly in and out on conference days. My connections are so tight that I’ll be carrying on my luggage…I’m not worried. GPCW (from my PhD project) is also going, and we always have fun together. We’re even on the same flights.

In honor of the conference, I got a beautiful new haircut today! I’ll try to post a picture soon. Of course, I can probably never get it to look just as nice as the stylist did today. Also, I’ve been gleefully using those portraits Briar took of me last year (before she left for a little European island) all over the web, and though they are beautiful they show my long lustrous hair, not my short stylish hair. Briar is visiting NZ at the moment. Maybe if I can feel confident with my home styling routine, I could convince her to snap some pics?