School
- I took my qualifying exams. I'm really glad I never have to do those again. But finishing them came with an upgrade to post-qualifying status and a pay raise, so it was a worthwhile experience.
- Classes were pretty cool. I took this statistical programming (SAS) class which I really enjoyed and ended up being very helpful to my current research.
- I've done some research and obtained results! And those results aren't null! I submitted abstracts based on those results to a few conferences and found out that they were accepted and I have to give a talk on one of them next spring...in Amsterdam!
- I tutored Gross Anatomy this fall and was reminded that I love teaching and that (thankfully) research is not the be-all-end-all of academic life.
- I went to California for the first time! I got a scholarship to attend a conference in San Francisco, and I stayed with family in Oakland. It was a lovely place even though I'll probably never live there because I'm poor. I'm looking forward to being able to visit the bottom half of California some day.
- I also checked Iowa off of my list of states I need to visit when I attended for a research training meeting. Iowa was decidedly less interesting than California, but there were some cool things in Iowa City, and getting to stay in my own hotel room never hurts at all.
- I also went to Pennsylvania three times. The second time I brought a man with me.
Church: The most exciting thing was that after five years of just participating, I finally got to be in charge of the Relief Society Christmas Concert! I had been gunning for the job for a while, so I pretty much felt like Professor Snape when he finally gets that DatDA teaching position, though fortunately I didn't Avada Kedavra the Stake President at the end of it (though I was pretty stressed, so I wouldn't have ruled it out). You can watch a video of the concert here.
![]() |
| This is pretty much how I conduct. |
2015 has been a good year.
