Countdown: Two months!
Feb 23rd 2006WallabyGeneral & nerd alert & thesis
Two months until I defend. Give or take a few days, that is; I haven’t picked a date quite yet. Last week of April, most likely. This is mostly a public checklist of stuff I need to get done:
Labwork:
* Impulse experiment — the controls are done, just need specimens.
* Aged/young murine study — gotta figure out how many specimens I need, which depends on how big a difference I can expect for the two different populations. And how big a difference I can see, which is probably the harder limit.
Writing:
* Thesis! duh. Decided to completely redo the outline this morning; I think it’ll be a lot more complete now, although the third data chapter is going to be something of a lightweight. Or a lot of hand-waving to explain the results. (Did you know that hand-waving actually improves comprehension of mathematics?)
* Turn the two experiments into papers. No real deadline on this, fortunately, and even better I can just condense the two thesis chapters into papers. That will (would?) make 7 papers for graduate school.
* Public slides. These are mostly done, although I’d like to kill a couple hours making them a bit more entertaining/fun. Or perhaps not, since they’ll also double as job-talk slides.
Job:
* My last lead in NC seems to have dried up; or at least he was the last professor I’d identified as likely to be interested. He did say he’d pass my CV around the department, though, so I’m not completely without hope. Still nothing back from GE; two months and no reply is as good as no reply.
* Looks like the deadline for Teach for America has passed. Bummer. I can still Teach4NC though; of course, that’d mean several years of night classes to be officially qualified to explain non-covalent interactions to teens. (It isn’t actually all that hard. Covalent interactions means the atoms are married; if they’re just going out, it’s non-covalent. The NEA thinks I need an education degree to say that, though.)