grad school rocks! grad school is going to make my brain explode!
So...
Thursday night last week was one of the better days I have had in a long time. Not only was I looking at a three-day weekend due to the observance of Veteran's Day, but the seminar speaker for the afternoon was Dr. Jim Marden - a guy I think of as famous for his work on the evolution of flight in early insects. He has done a lot more work on a lot more integrative biology since then - pushing the science at the level of the gene into its effects on behavior and population structure. One of the projects he is exploring looks at the frequencies of certain genes in a metapopulation of butterflies. These genes are responsible for the butterflies' ability to convert sugar to energy and stay aloft for long periods of time, and inadvertently represent the butterflies' ability to migrate from one area to another. Butterflies who express one form of this gene tend to be very good at staying in their natal patch and reproducing there. Butterflies who express another form of this gene tend to disperse and migrate out onto new patches.
This is interesting because the butterflies also sometimes go extinct on a given patch as their environment gradually changes, but their population as a whole has stayed approximately the same size over many years. This is exciting stuff, because it appears that there is a form of balancing selection encouraging a particular frequency of "colonial" butterflies, and a frequency of "homebodies" within the population as a whole. For the population to avoid extinction, it must be continually expanding through colonization at a rate which matches the rate of patch extinction and environmental change - but if there are insufficient butterflies in a given patch because everybody has moved away, the population density will be too low to reproduce effectively, and they will also go extinct in a given patch. This encourages heterozygosity within the population for individuals who carry the genetic potential of both alleles... and makes one wonder at the level of selection: is it merely at the level of the individual carrying forth the generations, or is it better to consider this at the level of a whole population exploring different adaptive strategies in response to two separate environments?
Crazy stuff!
We had dinner catered by a local "Latin" restaurant at Dr. Dan Hahn's home afterwards. I really want to take Dr. Hahn's insect physiology course next semester, because this is the sort of thing that interests me. More importantly, I want to see if I can convince Dr. Hahn to teach a special topic - or at the very least mentor a seminar in insect developmental genetics, because I think it would be fun, and he has the background for it. I got to meet more of the folks around the department and see professors outside of their professional environment. I had more course options and ideas tossed at me for future coursework and research directions. I met more of the students around the department, and a few folks from outside of the department who had shown up to meet our guest speaker. I was excited, I was thrilled!
I loved grad school!
Then I went home and started to study for biochem for another hour before I went to bed. And then I got up on Friday morning, and went to a review session with some of my classmates, and studied for another six hours. Some of my friends forced me to take a break, but when I came home, I got in another hour before I went to bed. I got up on Saturday morning, and put in another four hours of review before the truly awful Florida game. My friends then twisted my arm a little and forced me to watch Fight Club - just to give me a little more perspective before I went back to work.
I got up on Sunday, and put in another four hours on biochem while I did my laundry.
Grad school makes my brain want to explode!
That said, I still love it. I haven't had this much fun in years, and no matter what the final outcome of today's test: I am in far better command of this material than I have been in years. I will walk away from this institution with more familiarity in subject areas I was once intimidated by, and I will continue hungrily forward in related research.
Upwards and onwards!
Forward the future!