Today’s inane image of the day:
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| My new iPhone background — this breathtakingly beautiful sunrise greeted me in the O’Dowd parking lot yesterday morning. |
Today was quite a day… this morning at around 6:30AM, as I was preparing my lunch for the day, I got a phone call from one of my classmates. I was a bit confused when I heard the phone ring, and much more confused when I walked over to see who it was that was ringing me at this ridiculous hour. Turns out, my classmate’s wife took both sets of keys in the morning and thus left him stranded.
Being the type of person that sort of believes in good karma, I went to pick him up [who lived 20 minutes in the opposite direction of school]. Furthermore, we had a TBL today, so all of us needed to be there.
I’m not sure what I was thinking when I calculated the time I would need to pick him up and get to school… somehow 1 hour seemed like ample time to do all of this. Apparently not. Well, it would have been if morning traffic didn’t exist. Either way, we told our respective groups that we were on our way, and because we go to an absolutely incredible institution, the professor running TBL today stalled until we were close to allow us to participate.
Did I mention that I love my school? Because I do.
Anyway, the rest of the day is a blur to me now [probably because of those ugly gray clouds hanging around here…]. I do remember consuming donuts [we had a PRISM Brown Bag lunch today that featured a Urologist discussing his specialty] and learning about viruses, immunodeficiency and safe global traveling. But… not much else [well, actually, I think that was pretty much my whole day].
Today’s medical school fact of the day: Those of us who received the Hepatitis B vaccination have antibodies against HBsAg [Hepatitis B surface antigen]. — Virology lecture notes
This reminds me of similar experiences I’ve had recently with my research group. The short version is that my co-advisor will go out of the way to build personal connections with the students, and provides resources to the members of the group. For example, he’s having one of the first-year international PhD students present his work on his class project to the group so that we can provide feedback to this new student so that he knows if he’s on the right track. That’s just cool, and shows how my advisors are committed to actually advising and helping us along, rather than just extracting publications from us (as some, even in the same department, do).
that was nice of you to give your classmate a ride!
Excellent post. Good karma coming your way very soon, in the form of donuts and spicy cheetos.
-Dino
@Dino: Mmm. I’m waiting for this “good karma” to come to my area! =P
@Anon: I try. Hey, most of my classmates would do the same for me. =)
@Kyle: It’s good to hear about a positive graduate school experience! I do feel like I hear about an overwhelming number of grad school horror stories, so it’s good to know that good programs do exist!