advisor

My advisor is awesome.  Besides being someone who thinks very clearly about difficult topics, and can explain them in a way that makes them seem simple, he is a very thoughtful person and is just plain nice.  Furthermore, we seem to be very much on the same wavelength as he also has MD/PhD training (although he did not finish the clinical years of the MD), so we both want to pursue questions with clinical implications.

I appreciate this even more as I talk to other PhD students who have had nightmare experiences with their thesis advisors.  (Definitely talk to the students before deciding on anyone.)

I'm still in the fun stage of research where everything is new and interesting - and should be, since it's only day four of being a PhD student.  What's even better is that this time I get to steer things in a direction that I find interesting, and I get to determine the initial question.

I am getting more and more excited as I continue to delve deeper in the literature.  I have wanted for years to do something involving allergy, immunology, and mathematical modeling, but as an undergraduate, for the life of me I couldn't find anyone doing anything remotely similar to what I had in mind.  Amazingly... it looks like it might actually be feasible, especially as my advisor's thoughts are moving along the same lines I've sort of been thinking about for a long time.  Even more crazily, a lot of the data wasn't available until the past year or two.  Maybe by the time I get to residency, the biology of skin immunology will be advanced enough to do some serious modeling.  It's not quite there yet, but I am for the moment pretty content to be (finally!) within the right biological ballpark.

Moral of the story: just because you can't find anyone doing what you're interested in doesn't mean it's a bad idea.  It might just mean that it is a new thing that no one else has yet pursued... and it's up to you to pursue it.