phoenix smoulders
On Monday, I found out that I am but four points shy of being the second person in over ten years of biochemistry to pull off an "A" without having first taken organic chemistry - and the class average is rumored to be at least ten points below me. All I have to do is really crack down and blow away the next two tests and the final - and I can end this semester feeling that I have accomplished something worthwhile. The prof is even recommending another series of advanced genetics courses, and is encouraging me to apply for the medicinal genetics lab course taught at the hospital over the summer session. They only take five folks, so I'll have to be stellar - but the amusing thing is that it mostly sounds like playing through all of the roles laid out across the pharmbio labs back at Lexicon... which is all I really wanted to do in the first place, so I will have come full circle...
In the meantime, I am still trying to work out whether I want paleontology as a hobby or to potentially take it more seriously as a profession. It would be deeply personally satisfying, and there are few things in the world that would probably make me happier, but... I don't know that I am not just imagining things - and entomology is unquestionably still far more employable. More importantly, I've found a few things in entomology that really grab my attention and are starting to pull me in. Of course, the problem is that they have very little to do with my alleged thesis project working with thrips.
My advisor wants me to work on some form of ecological control, developing a growth curve on several different host plants at different temperatures - but while important, I find this intellectually dissatisfying. I remain more interested in the potential molecular aspects. I'd like to improve upon current identification methods and design a set of custom primers that could be used to ID several different ecologically significant species in the field with a quick PCR test. This would beat the heck out of the current method, which involves sending a physical sample for an expert to eyeball in either Gainesville, Washington DC, or Australia! Moreover, I suspect that one could probably use a simple tissue-lysate to get relative levels of populations within an individual plant sample by refining a QPCR or something to look at the ramp-up rate and guess how many individual copies were in the initial lysate. This beats counting them all by hand under a microscope, which is the current method. Of course, I am still far more interested in looking at the family trees to try and determine port of origin... knowing the invading organism's recent environmental history would tell you where the infection came from, and what critical resistances or tolerances that particular population might have developed at its last port of call.
Alternatively... Of late, I find that I really still like parasitoid wasps. For whatever reason (it has to be that slender petiolate waist!), I've always been fond of them (which might explain why I've been stung so many times) - but they have some really great aspects of biology to them... Most of them (but not all!) are haplodiploid breeders with really wild female control over sex-ratios, and they parasitize other organisms, which is always weird and interesting in a disturbingly intimate sort of way... to say nothing of the socials and kin-selection. I guess they just make a neat model organism for testing lots of different but significant theories of evolution, which only makes them more attractive.
So what do I do about it?
I could just grit my teeth and bear it until I get my master's, and then go do a doctorate somewhere else.
Of course, I've done that teeth-gritting thing before, and it didn't do anything for me except give me TMJ and a desperate sense of personal dissatisfaction. I know I could do it and survive, but somehow - I suspect that there is a better way. I could attempt to convince my advisor to change the focus of my project to something a little more molecular, or to let me study the effectiveness of several chalcidoid wasps as natural predators... or I start looking for a new and more compatible advisor who might have funding available for a student interested in their line of work. One of my professors is looking at a possible speciation event in his tiger beetles based on behavioral, environmental, and chronological differentiation. He needs someone to help him with the sequencing, and to find a good reporter region by which to distinguish populations. I'd like more practical experience with sequencing, and I'd end up working in the phylogeneticist's lab where I am beginning to spend a lot more of my time just hanging out with the guys talking about biology and stupid movies...
So this could be all sorts of good.
I don't know where it or I am going... I just know that for the first time in a long time, I actually feel like I am increasingly in control of my own life and fate - and darn it - I am consistently happy.