Onward and Upward

Ok, now that I'm calm, cool and collected, I can elaborate on the Dreaded Committee Meeting of last week.

(Warning: if you're not a science geek or grad student, you may just want to stop reading right now...)

Basically, my committee is awesome. Its made up of my boss and 4 other profs - 2 biochemists, 1 immunologist, and 1 biomedical engineer. I have a good rapport with the biochemists; it was the other two that had me worried. I haven't had much interaction with either of them previously - I collaborated with a student in the engineer's group but those experiments didn't yield good results - and I didn't know how mean they would be to me. (I've heard horror stories, but admittedly they've been from students in other departments. Politics in my department don't seem to be as cut-throat as in some others. Thank goodness!) Plus, they were the two with the most knowledge about the kind of work I do so I was really paranoid about their reactions to my research so far.

But as it turns out, and as I stated earlier, they were awesome. They offered a lot of great insights and suggestions - so much so that I really wish I had set up this meeting a long time ago, but I can't do anything about that now so oh well. Onward and upward, right.

The upshot is basically that the last, major experiment I was proposing is being tossed out the window and replaced by other, more manageable experiments (good) that will require me to learn new methodologies (a bit intimidating but good experience) and also have a better chance of yielding positive results (very good).

And my old experiments aren't being completely discarded. Instead, we're trying to convince a potential collaborator at the medical school, who has much more experience dealing with my virus, to possibly take those over (or at the least be willing to hold my hand through the process). So far we've been shooting emails back and forth, but we'll try to teleconference with him tomorrow about possibilities. As always the major hurdle is money, which unfortunately has all but dried up on our end. I'm keeping my fingers crossed because these experiments would definitely be the icing on the cake for my dissertation.

Anyway, I'm doing lots of reading on the new techniques I'll need to employ, tracking down resources, finding people who will allow me to pick their brains, all that fun stuff that researchers do before they dive head first into new experiments. For the next few months, I will be holed up in lab and don't plan on seeing much of my husband, but hopefully all this hard work will end in a PhD.

Wish me luck. And if you happen to have special skills in transfecting mammalian cells, membrane protein purification, fast protein liquid chromatography, Maldi-TOF/TOF mass spectrometry, or fluorescence activated cell sorting, I'd like to talk to you! :)