Ed's Big Plans

Okay okay okay– so the defense was about four days ago, I need to get myself organized… these are the projects I can afford to participate in OR are the projects that will yield the most return in terms of enjoyment or some other intangible value.

Immediate Focus

• Get married– with the wedding now only two weeks away, I need to pull everything I need together and really support Cara in the remaining tasks. As far as I understand, almost everything is in order already and it’s down to ballroom dance practicing etc. and getting our lines memorized. Well, there’s probably a lot more in terms of communicating with the flower girl and ring bearer– and my family– so hopefully we’ll magically finish just on time. Plus there’s a week in August where we’ll be at Disney World for the honeymoon, so I’ll certainly find myself in a bubble away from anything else.

Long Term Focus

• The PhD– I’ve already written to Liz and Brendan about the summer, or actually– the changes about this summer. Earlier on, we had agreed it would be good if I got a head start on the PhD project in summer. At the very least, I’d refine the problem space and be able to formalize my interests. It looks like the most rational thing to do now is to do a normal clean start in Fall since there are a few outstanding things I need to tackle back at Guelph.

Important Intermediate Projects (In Randomly Generated Order)

• Graduating and all its caveats (Must Finish)– I need to fix the thesis, which means I need to get the examiners’ notes back. I also need to finish some paper work — I have a stack of signed documents that I shouldn’t lose that has to be handed in with the final thesis, and another stack of signed documents that has to be handed in with the department keys. This item doesn’t stress me out as much as it probably should…

• iGEM (Would Be Nice)– I’ve been delegated nothing right now, so I actually should chase down Andre next week when we morph from developers to end users. Yes, that’s right– we shall suffer the glory of using our own software creation. I really ought to checkout the repository to see if I can understand the code logic after everyone’s touched it (the modules are more or less mature at this point). Reading the code would be a start — After that, the modeling team will probably break apart and merge into other teams in UWiGEM. Plus there’s mathematical modeling, planning for next year etc. The iGEM project has the potential to be paper worthy if we manage to get some decent results… it’ll be a feat of an interdisciplinary team which makes me happy to be a part of it all.

• Chris’ Project (Must Finish)– So, this item is always running in the background since I’m not the primary owner of this project. Chris has done an excellent job with the science so far, which motivates me to offer him the support he needs to finish… this one’s another potential paper– but again, we need to get results and actually have something interesting to say. He’s actually doing five-fold and leave-one-out cross validation schemes right now, but that’s a post for another time.

• MSc-X3 (Would Be Nice)– The math paper! Stefan and I decided a long time ago that a math paper would be good to complete the story of the NGN. This would actually be slightly more comprehensive than the thesis in explaining the math, including things like run time costs and analysis plus all of the equations that got lost in the translation.

• Andre’s Mystery MSc-??? (Would Be Nice)– I have little detail about this, but it’s another gene management system with the additional feature that fragments can be checked out and added to end users’ own databases. I’m really curious to learn more. The last I heard, Andre managed to churn out code that didn’t have any bugs– panicked at the lack of bugs– then found some bugs– and was relieved.

Other Concerns

• I’m going to stop short of listing three additional projects I had been working on previously– I have realized that I don’t have time, and the organizations (and one person) to whom these projects belong to are probably aware that I managed to get buried in work… I really want to revisit these items in future, but I am unsure when time will come available again.

Met with Dr. Meiering (Liz) and Dr. McConkey (Brendan) on Tuesday.

We’ve basically decided on the courses that I’m best suited for in the role of a TA. They recommended that I try out for Molecular Biotechnology since it relates especially to the thesis I’ll be working on. I’m tempted to agree as well, especially since I do have a bit of history with the stuff in my undergraduate project as well as iGem last year. As a secondary choice, I chose Cell Biology as it’s something I’m very familiar with and use in day to day activities.