Earlier this week I presented my research to our department as part of my second year seminar. **Spoiler: I think it was a smashing success and I have a newfound confidence that I realllllly need moving forward (so yay for that!!).** Ok, now some background: Each year in our program, students must create a ~40…

In college I was a Resident Assistant (…I know, coolest kid on campus), and I learned a lot of really important lessons from that job. One of the greatest pieces of advice I was given was: “You don’t have to set yourself on fire to keep others warm.” I was told this because back when…

Growing up, I played a lot of different sports (soccer, basketball, track, tennis, lacrosse, dance, you name it) and enjoyed playing videogames and card games with my older siblings, cousins, and friends. One of my favorite things about playing all these different games was the competitive nature of them and knowing that I could piss…

For those of you who don’t know, genetics and evolutionary biology were my first loves (in science). So this post kind of goes along with that… In evolutionary biology, there is a hypothesis for evolution called “The Red Queen Hypothesis”. This hypothesis proposes that “species must continually evolve to survive in the face of their…

One of my best friends in graduate school has taken on the leadership role for planning our program’s annual retreat, and recently our program directors asked her to send a list of 3-4 “prestigious scientists” that we (students) would be interested in having serve as the keynote speaker for this retreat. She asked me if…

[Content warning: mention of mental health issues] I am technically writing this on August 2nd, I meant to write it yesterday, and I will probably end up posting it tomorrow. Oh well. That’s just life sometimes. Ok, here we go! Our new cohort of students arrived, which makes me officially a 2nd year graduate student…