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4 months is a long time to go without any posts here. After making my big decision of picking a lab, I took sometime off and spent a good one month at home. Just about the time I got back, Philly welcomed me with an earthquake on the same day I landed and an Irene that very weekend :| Within 3 days of settling down, I was back to grad school and most importantly it was my first day in the lab – my lab for the next few years :)

With teaching alongside coursework and preparing for quals, applying for fellowships and deciding upon my thesis work while doing some preliminary experiments has been a little too much to take in one go. These last few months it felt like I had time for nothing but work. And just when I thought it was getting better, the semester is almost coming to an end with quals in December which is again nerve wracking and also my head telling me – damn it, already 2 months in lab with no data! Its amazing how slowly things move in science when things around us just zoom past by.

With those updates, my take on teaching so far: to put it simply, I’m really enjoying it. I’m glad I took up a lab course where we are supposed to teach 2 lab sessions every week which is 3 hour long each. I have about 15-16 students in each section which is a good number – you can actually get to know them and any day easier to teach small classes. I was a little nervous in my first session but figured these kids might be as nervous as they are all freshmen at Penn. Except for the weekly grading of their lab reports and assignments and the midterm grading which is even worse (as we do it for the entire class which is about 230 students), it is fun. It does take up a lot of time but now that I think about it, its actually good that we have to do this in our 2^nd year of grad school and be done with it when we anyway have too many things going on and when its not so easy to get a good amount of research work done.

iGEM is back this year – I could not go last year but I think I’ll be going this year. The team from IIT Madras seems to be doing well so far and the fact that they had to do a selection at the regional level probably means that the teams competing in the world championship are all pretty good ones. That reminds me – its sad that Penn doesn’t have an undergrad team representing at iGEM. What is it? An Ivy League?! Maybe I could talk about this at some point with my students and atleast make them aware that something as cool as iGEM exists. I’m excited about seeing some cool stuff at MIT over the weekend. I’ll definitely have a post here on that one.