Not so much of a post, more of a life update, but I'm in grad school and I have a prelim exam on Monday so I am swamped right now. For those that don't know, a prelim exam is basically an entrance exam for your chosen grad school program. After a year or two of classes, you (theoretically) absorb all of this information and then have to demonstrate to a committee that you know enough in order to formally enter your graduate program. It is a kinda weird system, pretty antiquated as well, but it is what you have to do. And it might be one of the most stressful parts of grad school.
The specifics of the exam vary from program to program, for mine we propose a thesis project and submit a one-page summary of our goals and plan, then we present the project to a committee of four members of the department. During the presentation, the committee members are going to try and ascertain the limits of our knowledge to make sure that we know enough to enter the program. So there is definitely a lot of stress and pressure riding on this.
My proposal involves examining gene regulation within different cell states. So plenty of studies look at gene regulation within different cell types, but not many look at gene regulation in different stimulatory states. I want to amass a dataset on pancreatic beta cells in different states and see if that can give insight into type 2 diabetes. And of course it is a lot more involved than that, but that's the gist.
So no real post this week, but I just got a shipment of books in so I'm looking forward to writing about those soon!
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