Gainfully Employed
Well, after two weeks in which my ego was significantly inflated by a series of job offers, I've finally decided on one. Come Monday, I will be working at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (one of the Harvard hospitals, hot shit) as a clinical research assistant. I'll be working in the cardiac servies/preventative cardiology lab . . . my PI just got one of the monster NIH grants they hand out every 5-10 years for something ricockulous like $18 million, to study coronary heart disease through: 1) a new diagnostic imaging tool; 2) a new statin (choloesterol) drug; 3) DNA database collection to try and establish a genetic link to CHD and all the lovelies that go along with it.
And, as irony would have it, I'm also going to be spending one week out of the month BACK in Ohio, studying an Amish community near Wooster . . . my PI's been working with community since 1989, and has been collecting blood (DNA, etc.) and medical histories since then -- there seems to be a real connection in the families to diabetes type II, and it's an excellent community to study recessive genetics, with all the family intermarriage and whatnot.
So, yeah. I'm stoked. Should be lots of work, and I have to get up at the ass-crack of dawn like the rest of the real world, but I'm still really, really excited. Once the study gets going (probably not until January or February, hence while I'll be working with Amish until then), it's going to take about 30 months to reach completion, not including manuscript preparation if we find anything significant . . . which means I'm pretty much locked into Boston for the next 3 years unless something doesn't work out.
And the best part ever: I don't even have to look at mice or rats if I don't want to -- which means I also can stop carrying around this freakin' inhaler everywhere I go.
YAY!
And, as irony would have it, I'm also going to be spending one week out of the month BACK in Ohio, studying an Amish community near Wooster . . . my PI's been working with community since 1989, and has been collecting blood (DNA, etc.) and medical histories since then -- there seems to be a real connection in the families to diabetes type II, and it's an excellent community to study recessive genetics, with all the family intermarriage and whatnot.
So, yeah. I'm stoked. Should be lots of work, and I have to get up at the ass-crack of dawn like the rest of the real world, but I'm still really, really excited. Once the study gets going (probably not until January or February, hence while I'll be working with Amish until then), it's going to take about 30 months to reach completion, not including manuscript preparation if we find anything significant . . . which means I'm pretty much locked into Boston for the next 3 years unless something doesn't work out.
And the best part ever: I don't even have to look at mice or rats if I don't want to -- which means I also can stop carrying around this freakin' inhaler everywhere I go.
YAY!