So I thought I should define the term I used a few days ago, namely, “Graduate Student”. I’m a graduate student in a Biochemistry department in Syracuse, NY. I started in the fall of 2000, and I’ll be finishing in the summer of 2006. Six long hard years. In the natural sciences, a student typically spends an average of 6 years doing research and publishing results. They do research in a laboratory after a year or two of classes, and then defend their thesis work in order to finish. Here at this institution, students typically publish two first-author papers before they leave. I, unfortunately, don’t have a first-author “results paper” yet, just a first-author review paper I wrote on Nuclear Actin. I do however have 2 other papers in which I contributed to the results. So I need one more first-author paper to finish. And I need it soon, so needless to say I’m working my butt off to try to complete my work by next August. Why do I need to finish by then? More about the next step later.

Tomorrow is the big day, the Big Bottle day. I’m dreading so much, especially since he was so adorable last night when I got home. I know it’s not going to go well, and that it will take every bit of effort I can muster just to stay calm. But as long as he figures out that bottle, it will all be worth it.

Can you spot a fake smile from a real smile? Check out the test at BBC here. I got 50% right, 10 out of 20 smiles. I thought I’d do better!