Oof, what a day. So, yesterday's exam completely wiped me out, to such an extent that I was still wiped out this morning. Of course, I still had both classes to attend, a lab to teach and a second (marathon) exam to take. Yaaaay, grad school ( Read more... )

Oh grad school. In the next three days, I will have two exams 24 hours apart (possibly 3 in 48 hours, although we've been promised that this won't happen). Somehow within that time, I need to learn all of the material for said exams, grade 2.5 weeks' worth of backlog work from my students (despite grading steadily this whole time), and also do ( Read more... )

So. Cumes: VERY frustrating. Today was my first ever cume (cumulative exam). For us organic folk, they are basically like an exam you would get in an organic class - explain this, write the mechanism for that, classify this as a {blah}. We get no warning as to what will be on the exam ahead of time, and I expected to walk in, not know ( Read more... )

For the first time, my project has actually stumped me. Going to let the problem simmer in the back of my head overnight, and am hoping for a genius thought of my own to happen. I'd hate to have to tell my advisor about a roadblock and NOT have a creative work-around (or next step of any sort) to offer.   To be fair, this is the first time in ( Read more... )

Well, yesterday was quite eventful. I:
1) Missed my bus in the morning b/c I couldn't cross the very busy street to the bus stop quickly enough (i.e. in the 8 minutes I left for that purpose)

2) Decided to try to intercept the second bus I take by walking what I thought would be ~4 blocks.

3) Failed to do this. Decided to then just walk the ( Read more... )

So, a downside to frolicking through the snow yesterday and using my Walk of Never Falling Down(TM) are that today I can't move my legs. The epic muscle soreness actually caused joint pain (I think), so I had a VERY late start to the day ( Read more... )

Welcome!

Here are all the books I managed to read this year. I'm not counting re-reads, cookbooks, or textbooks (because let's face it, unless you're also a grad student in chemistry, I doubt you will have encountered these textbooks). As you'll see, this has truly been a year of Pratchett for me!
( Vote here! )

I have officially joined my group - I have keys and a desk and everything! Today was my first group meeting, where I finally met most of the group, and vice versa. Turns out, last group meeting before Christmas = presents from our advisor! We each got a school sweatshirt, which is rather adorable. I quite liked the atmosphere of the group ( Read more... )

Guys, guys, I finally have an advisor, and it was my first choice! Yay!

Sadly, the friend that also chose that group got bounced to his second choice, so my good news is bittersweet AND I feel super bad about it. Why can't everyone have nice things?

In other news, the GenChem final I had to TA at crazy-o'clock this morning (7:00am) resulted in ( Read more... )

Friday was by far the best day I've had in a long time. I'd sort of like to freeze it in amber so that I can look back on it whenever grad school tries to crush my soul. Instead, I'm putting it here ( Read more... )