and so it begins anew

The new semester has begun. So far, there are several totally amazing things. First, I have a new job, sort of. I was working as a research assistant all summer. When school started, I wanted to keep going with the same job. I also wanted to work more than the 20 hours allowed by the university and take less than the 9 required credits that let you work on campus. Unfortunately, the department I work for doesn't really like to deal with the paper work created by such requests. Fortunately, the professors I work for came up with what is definitely a better solution.

One of my professors needed a TA for the class he's teaching this semester. For some reason, there have been a shortage of TA's throughout the department this semester. They asked if I would be his TA for the 20 hours the university allows me to work, while doing my RA work on the side. In return for doing the RA work, they are paying my tuition for 10 credits. Switching back to TA jobs also ended up getting me a $1 raise. Also, since I had to find classes to raise my credits from 3 to 10, I'm now taking my BIO100 (required for generals, and full of freshman) as well as Japanese, which so far has been awesome.

Another pretty awesome thing comes from my RA job. During my hours, there is a graduate class held in the lab, and I've talked to the class about my project and a few of the things I've been researching. Also, I'm working with a couple of the students in that class to submit answers to the DREAM3 challenge, which sounds totally lame, but is actually pretty cool. It's all about reverse engineering gene regulatory networks from microarray data, which is exactly what my research is doing, with moderate success. I'll probably be attending the conference where the results of the challenge will be announced out at MIT. It should be around the end of October.