Breathe

I finally have some breathing room. I've been running around in the lab like crazy working on controls for our paper revisions (which are due tomorrow BTW). Two weeks of working 14 hour days 6 days a week, plus another 5 on my off day, was killing me. After all the experimentation dust settled, I nested in my office chair and began the data analysis. My hamstrings have never been so tight, just from sitting for so long!

To make a long and stressful story, short and less stressful, I finished working up the last of the data yesterday (which I also collected yesterday) and sent the last additional figure to Supervisor. Over the week I've been sending him figures as I finish them, so he could work on the rebuttal.

Today I reviewed the supplemental material he wrote, and I'm very happy with it. He's currently adjusting the main body of the manuscript and I should receive that later today to look over. Tomorrow we send it off. Hopefully, this will shut up the mean reviewers trap. Actually, we did most of the new controls to answer nice reviewer's points (who may or may not be my idol WRT my project- though Supervisor and I are both leaning to may). While, Supervisor just schooled mean reviewer on the important aspects of the technique we use.

So overall, I'm now happier with the whole thing. I even got some marking done last night, looks like my students will recieve their reports on time afterall!

On another note, our department allows gradstudents to rank their top 2 teaching choices for each semester. Obviously, some courses are better than others. Right now I'm teaching a course that probably isn't the easiest and doubtfully anyone's first choice. I teach it because the prep is minimal since I've taught it last year, and before that a friend of mine in my group taught it. I get along witht he lab/course cooridinator very well, he's very preceptive to our ideas, and we have made many changes in the labs over the last 2 years. The downside is, he is not teaching the course next year, and another prof will be taking over. She's less hands on (aka indifferent, aka lazy), so I see very little interaction with her. This is also the first time she is teaching this course, she normally teaches the higher level class.

Another negative, the marking. There's tons of it. Even though my prep is minimized from previous experience, I found that the course still takes up tons of my time. This semester, I've only been able to get into the lab 1 maybe 1.5 days a week. I want to start rolling on some of my ideas. Since I'm not on scholarship, I'll still need to teach, to you know...eat and stuff. So. I've been talking to Supervisor and ran my great idea past him. He's the director of a new program in our faculty, it offers a minor in a specifice science subfield. This program is pretty much his baby at the moment. This semester he offered the first class, the goal of the whole program is to approach teaching in a different way. It focuses on inquiry based learning and the lectures tend to be ~15 min lecture on some new idea, followed by 50 mins group work on a term project. The project itself usually is a novel way to design or use the "star" in this particular subfield. The TA's for the course attend the lectures, and walk around the rest of the lecture answering questions and helping the students with the formulation of their ideas, they mark weekly quizes, and I think are responsible for marking one question on the exams. Pretty easy work load. Plus, this subfield that the program is focused on, yea...we do that in our group, so I'm pretty comfortable with the material.

Supervisor agreed and will get me his courses assigned to my teaching schedule next year. He will be teaching the same course that is currently being offered (an intro course) in the fall, and a more advanced instrumental course in the winter. We are still in the design phase of the instrumental course, so that will be part of my teaching duties, to help design the course. Basically, how can we teach instrumentation to promote inquiry learning, we'll be drumming up (aka inventing) some interesting problems/case studies/plot lines to accomplish that. I'm really looking forward to it.

Other than that, I'm still collecting data for my upcoming conference, at the end of April. The day before the conference starts, I'm organizing a seminar series in the city where my conference is held. I'm organizing a summer school in May and then I'm off to another conference.

May will be insane, lots of traveling in a short amount of time. I think I'll bask in the opprotunity to breathe while I still have it...