First Two Weeks!

Hello! I was honestly planning to post a big review of my first week of grad school, but the adjustment to busy days hit me a little harder than I had thought it would! I was going to bed by 9:30 or 10 most nights. However, a new post is long overdue. So here we go!

My first two weeks have been really full, but really good. I've started training in my lab, going to classes and doing all the social things that being part of a graduate department entails. Between my classes, lab meetings, reading groups and just generally getting acclimated to Illinois, I feel like I'm running around all day!

I am so excited about the lab I am in. I love all the people, for starters. My advisor's lab has one post-doc, four graduate students, and one undergraduate assistant who is just starting out. Of the graduate students, three of us are first-years! It makes my classes and lab time a lot of fun. We are from completely different research backgrounds - one girl worked in this lab as an undergraduate, and the other spent several years working in a similar lab in Pennsylvania before going to graduate school. In a way, I feel very under-prepared for this kind of work when I'm compared to the two of them! However, they're really nice and we all get along really well. And my advisor is really great as well - he's very hands-off in terms of letting his students be independent, but he is always available to answer questions when we have them.

The research they're doing is really interesting, too. The lab mainly works with Native American tribes - the project I'm helping with now concerns a tribe in California. Rather than just "using" their information for our own goals, the lab really works with the tribes to try and find out things they are curious about, too. And every summer, my lab does an outreach program where we teach teenagers from this tribe how to do the sort of work we're doing. Often, we're trying to figure out how much European admixture is in the tribe - did they interact with Europeans at all? There are specific sequences we can look at to determine the region of origin - Europe, Asia, or Africa. In a few weeks we will be able to send off several samples - including mine - for sequencing to learn more about where our ancestors came from thousands of years ago. Being able to work with my own DNA is really cool.

Class-wise, I have just a few courses but a whole lot of seminars. Class-wise, I'm taking statistics and population genetics. Both are review courses, but I think they will be much-needed. Plus, as part of statistics I have to learn SAS, a programming language. Considering my (mostly-failed) attempt to learn Java in high school, we'll see how that goes! Seminar-wise, I have the weekly talks the whole department goes to, a semester-long orientation seminar that tells us how to be grad students, and a reading group that covers all sorts of topics I've never looked at before.

All in all, I'm really enjoying grad school so far! The hours are long and expectations are high, but I know I'm at a great university and - even better - the best place for me.