After days of shopping, packing, preparing, emotional goodbyes, and a 2 day drive, I have arrived in Columbus! I have actually been here since Friday but we don't have internet yet (the TimeWarner tech claimed to have gotten lost) and I haven't been online yet. I live in a 2 bedroom apartment right off a 4 lane road that leads to campus and the freeway. I'm about a mile North of campus but have to wind through a cemetery to get to the bike path. I have been getting around by bike mostly it's super easy in the city. My apartment is actually pretty nice for how cheap it was. My roommate is also in the program. He is a nice guy and I like him. He gets very excited about a lot of things (such as cheap spices being on sale at the nearby market and cooking overall) so it is a good balance to my laid back nature.
I still haven't actually started working it has taken longer than I imagined to get going. On Saturday I had several informal interviews with Professors via phone or in person and one of them decided he could make an extra opening in his lab for me. His name is Gustavo Leone. He is a very energetic researcher who is by his own admission extremely demanding and a hard-ass. His lab workers work incredibly hard and sometimes they don't publish papers for several years. It's a type of high-risk, high-reward attitude that isn't necessarily in my nature. However, his graduates that make it through go to the best Post-Doc places in the world (you should see the list, I'm completely serious) however and he gave me several days to decide.
I thought about the people in my life who have influenced me the most and what they were like. After hard thought and speaking to my dad and my old advisor, I realized the people that have gotten the most out of my (some of my tennis coaches like Coach Rodgers, high school science teachers, my high school band director, my favorite Professors at Coe, and several others) have set the bar extremely high and I accomplished more than I expected I would under their influence. I realized that there is also a difference between a "hard-ass" and a "jack-ass". Also this commitment for the time being is only this summer. I decided that if I was going to come out here and say goodbye to everyone I know and love, I owe myself a shot at working under the best. If it doesn't work out, then I'll have no regrets moving forward and I will have learned that much more about myself. If it works out......who knows the possibilities.
I contacted Gustavo telling him I was willing to do whatever it takes to be the best scientist that I could be and said I wanted to join his lab for the summer. After a delay in the response (which is one reason why I still haven't actually started working), he said he was excited to have me and would contact me with the details shortly. His lab works with several molecules in the cell cycle (such as the E2F family) and the pathways affected by it. The research falls under several departments but is most commonly known to be under the cancer research department since mutations or irregularities in expression of the E2F family often leads to tumor formation. The lab works with both mice and fruit flies and employs several graduate students, post-docs, and over 20 undergraduate assistants. Hopefully I will be paired someone that will push me and I hope to spend the summer learning everything I can before classes start in the fall.
Since I haven't actually met anyone yet other than my roommate, I have spent some time biking around the campus figuring out where everything is and working out in the RPAC which is the insanely large workout center right next to the football stadium and the Biomedical Research Tower (where I'll be working). For example, it has 6 full size basketball courts that only take up a portion of the first floor....of five. The top floor holds a track that is an 8th of a mile around. In between there are over 570 pieces of workout equipment, 8 racketball courts, 4 squash courts, 4 volleyball courts, and several workout rooms. It is truly a sight to behold.
Anyway I will sign off for now. Hopefully the post uploads. I will say more soon.
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