postponed

I've been stressing about my final lab presentation. First, I found out I needed to do one during Wednesday of orientation week, and consequently ditched the majority of the social events thereafter to try to prep for the presentation on the Tuesday following med classes starting.

It also took much of the fun out of having my parents visit for the White Coat Ceremony as I was pretty stressed about this and didn't really get a chance to show them around the city. The worst part is that I didn't really have much to present. I spent about three weeks getting oriented in lab and figuring out what was going on experimentally, two more weeks scoping out interesting questions, and finally the last week + orientation week looking up modeling papers on the topic and attempting to understand them. And the majority of my math reading/studying time has consisted of trying to learn vector calc and all the stuff at the end of my multi-variable calc text that we didn't get to in Calc III.

Obviously nobody really expected me to have some thesis-worthy work by tomorrow, but I'd certainly wish to have something to show for my summer!

But I did succeed in my goal for the summer: to find an interesting biological question that could be modeled. That in my mind is pretty decent, but still, it would be nice to have some kind of output - a model or three, maybe a nice simulation explaining everything there is to know about the biological phenomena. (Unrealistic, I know, especially as I'm pretty sure that with what I currently know I can't really even analyze the existing models in the literature.)

Ah well. They moved my presentation back at least two weeks, so I have a bit of a grace period. Except that now... I'm in med school. Hmmm. We have two days off in Sept. I think I know what I'll be doing.