This week I am being "Hooded". Basically that means I wear some robes (rented) and my mentor and the Dean of my college say a few words about me at the doctoral ceremony. My parents are coming to Delaware from Colorado because they wanted to take pictures...
My actual defense is June 11th.
I'll be happy to see my parents this weekend, regardless.
Why am I not more excited to be getting my doctorate after 27 years of academia (since I started preschool at age 4 in India)? I'm not sure... I think it's because of the following:
1. impending sense of DOOM due to the collapse of the American economy
2. impending sense of DOOM because science doesn't seem to matter to most people
3. impending sense of DOOM due to not having a job lined up yet
4. impending sense of DOOM because I don't know bioinformatics.
So what can I do about this sense of DOOM? Well, probably nothing about number 1 or 2 short term. Number 3 I am applying for everything which interests me, so I'm bound to get lucky sometime.
Number 4 is obvious, teach myself bioinformatics.
It's a painful process, though, since it requires expertise in computers, scripting/programming, understanding many openly available programs and data-harvesting sites, and lots of time.
Today I made some progress in this! I am trying to teach myself Qiime (pronounced chime apparently), and I am using their free tutorial to do so. It took me hours to just download and install the VirtualBox and get it running. Make space on my hard drive by backing-up/deleting old pictures. I had to figure out how to turn on virtualization technology in the BIOS of my laptop. Finally get to typing in commands and have Qiime do things for me using their example files.
All I did today was check to make sure the mapping file was properly formatted. Generally you get a file like this from 454 sequencing of 16S rRNAs. The program gave me a corrected file which looks good. YAY.
I will continue with this tomorrow. For now I have to go and format my dissertation. It must be sent to the committee on Monday next week.
My actual defense is June 11th.
I'll be happy to see my parents this weekend, regardless.
Why am I not more excited to be getting my doctorate after 27 years of academia (since I started preschool at age 4 in India)? I'm not sure... I think it's because of the following:
1. impending sense of DOOM due to the collapse of the American economy
2. impending sense of DOOM because science doesn't seem to matter to most people
3. impending sense of DOOM due to not having a job lined up yet
4. impending sense of DOOM because I don't know bioinformatics.
So what can I do about this sense of DOOM? Well, probably nothing about number 1 or 2 short term. Number 3 I am applying for everything which interests me, so I'm bound to get lucky sometime.
Number 4 is obvious, teach myself bioinformatics.
It's a painful process, though, since it requires expertise in computers, scripting/programming, understanding many openly available programs and data-harvesting sites, and lots of time.
Today I made some progress in this! I am trying to teach myself Qiime (pronounced chime apparently), and I am using their free tutorial to do so. It took me hours to just download and install the VirtualBox and get it running. Make space on my hard drive by backing-up/deleting old pictures. I had to figure out how to turn on virtualization technology in the BIOS of my laptop. Finally get to typing in commands and have Qiime do things for me using their example files.
All I did today was check to make sure the mapping file was properly formatted. Generally you get a file like this from 454 sequencing of 16S rRNAs. The program gave me a corrected file which looks good. YAY.
I will continue with this tomorrow. For now I have to go and format my dissertation. It must be sent to the committee on Monday next week.
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