gadhelyn

Funny, I feel the same way.

There was a student who studied all night for his zoology final. He gets to the room and the professor hands them paper for answer sheets then walks to the front of the room and places statuettes of bird feet on the front of the desk. He announces that the final exam is to identify the species of bird based upon their feet. The test begins and everyone sits there in thought for most of the exam, occasionally writing down an answer. The student takes the longest time and runs up to the front of the room to turn his test in after the deadline. The professor says he cannot accept it since the deadline has passed. Enraged, the student throws the stack of exams onto the floor, mixing his in with the rest, then heads towards the door to leave. Flabbergasted, the professor demands to know who this student is. The student stops, lifts up a pant leg, and replies "You tell me, professor, you tell me!" What do you call a tooth in a glass of water? A one molar solution. If a mole of moles were digging a mole of holes, what do you see? A mole of molasses!

But unlike grad school, American Idol requires oral exams when you apply, not once you get through the first part. Edit: But they're alike in the end: Once you get out of either you are offered a position that might permanently make you well-known, but you first have to actually succeed at it.

I wouldn't be surprised, I leave my desktop on all day and the poor things are here all day!

One of these days, though, there WILL be a letter. All I got today was a letter and a laminated photo from my vet telling me that one of my cats was pet of the week.

I gave one of my recommenders an extra sealed copy of her letter back, then she handed it right back to me.

Congrats! Now send those good vibes over here! Heh, one of the thoughts that helps me get through the workday is "maybe I'll have a letter today!" :-D

That's what I'm saying, I found someone who was trying to jump the gun and say "well, if you haven't heard from them now, it's bad news"

I just wanted to put this out there quickly: I was searching the results and came across a note at a school I applied to (but not in my department). This not said that there have been several interview invites given out, and if you haven't heard anything, then that's probably bad. Come on people, there is no bad news from universities until they outright reject you. It's still early in the admissions season, so not having an interview by now might just mean they haven't gotten to you yet, not necessarily that it's a bad sign! We're all nervous here, and we really should be doing all we can to support one another, rather than making the negative feelings worse!

All the publications I'm on I'm a coauthor, no first authors yet. I have my name on 2 papers under review (one for Journal of Clinical Investigation), 2 papers published, 2 posters, and a oral presentation at the American Heart Assoc.'s Scientific Sessions 2008.

My PI and Co-PI have now demonstrated why I want to leave this lab: I got a tongue lashing from my PI for not knowing information my Co-PI has not told me. My Co-PI generally avoids me because she does not like our PI and hence does not want to be associated with his work. I mean, yeah, I want to study bioinformatics and get my degree and start my own research, but I have to get out of here.

Eastern US, but as long as it's anywhere but here.

I wish I could have seen it, I was working.

Wow, MIT works fast. I haven't even started hearing anything, Kansas won't say anything until Feb 15th. Did you submit close to the deadline? They might be going through apps in order received. Might explain why you haven't heard anything yet.

I've been interested in science since I was 5ish and got presents like a telescope, microscope, chemistry set (actually, I think this was more like 9), and started watching Star Trek. At first I wanted to do physics, and went to Virg Tech my freshman year as a physics major. Then I wanted to do math, so I transferred to UNC-CH (I had more friends here than at VTech) and became a math major. Then I got a job at the endocrinology lab, and switched to biology. Last year I took a course on MATLAB and really enjoyed it, especially modeling the carbon backbone of proteins, and figured out that bioinformatics would be a wonderful fusion of the sciences I have enjoyed. Grad school will get me the training I need to perform research in bioinformatics regarding protein structure and function. Just the biochem and biophysics aspects of structure and function would take a PhD program to learn properly, but I also have to learn how to program at a high enough level and how to come up with and understand the formulas to predict structure and function. Why research, though? Right now we're working on an antibody that may decrease heart disease progression in diabetics to the progression of a normal human. In fact, we've submitted a manuscript of our first pig study with it, showing that the antibody decreased lesion development by about 60%. It's just been really exciting to see how research actually can have real world consequences. It's almost like a drug, the feeling from knowing something may have such an effect on medicine. One day maybe I could write a program that would be an accurate predictor of x-ray crystallography, which is how protein structures are currently discovered. X-ray crystallography takes about 10 years for a single protein.

It might help me to be more positive if my job were more positive nowadays. There's politics, in-fighting, passive aggressiveness, and the boss has me running more experiments than his post-docs, but without a clear cut hypothesis to work towards (we're doing "discovery" research, meaning he has a general idea of what he's looking for, won't give me details, and wants to see if he can pick a pattern from random data). That combined with trying to get myself to control my eating so I could lose 50 lbs and worrying over whether I'll be trashed outright just because of my GPA is causing me to be one unhappy gadhelyn.

That never stops me from punching my dad on occassion. Sometimes he deserves it!

I'd use a kick in the crotch.

What's a normal student to faculty ratio, then?

For the past 2 years I have gotten emails from the grad student organization here, even though I'm a staff member now. It's annoying

It was pretty easy for the first day after those denials, in which I was cursing them incessantly. Idiots. Applying to grad school does nothing good for self esteem, huh? Normally I'm absolutely sure in my abilities and the boundries of what I can do.

I feel negative, and only due to bad gpa (which can easily be explained by having worked 25-30 hours a week as an undergrad) For life science averages, my GRE scores are at least 100 points above normal on Q and V. I'm just worried they'd see the GPA and toss it into the trash before they see the rest. That's what a lot of people at a job fair my senior year did. Asked me my GPA then said "Sorry, nothing for you", not even wanting to hear about my time in the lab. Their loss.

oops, clicked the wrong 750-800, mine's usual for my program

There are lots of apartments, condos, and townhouses here in Morrisville. My commute to UNC-CH requires me to go to a park and ride a few miles from 40 and overall takes me about 40 mins one direction. The regional mass transit is really underbuilt. 40 gets bad after about 8 AM.

I will go into work cheering and dancing, race up to the PI's office and show him the letter, sign up for the Head Start program (assuming this is Emory) so I can start in June, turn in my notice to the apartment complex, buy a few six packs of Guinness, get a bunch of friends over and drink and play Wii.