Shit. I have not really described what on God's green earth I'm doing nowadays.

So I became a professor at Iowa State. It was an atypical hire. The department, much less the university, had no idea what they were really looking for when they advertised for a neuro person. Over time, the biochemists and human biomedical folk have come to understand my appeal. Perhaps not my work, but I have the brain initiative on campus with like-minded researchers to scratch that itch.

I work with secondary data analysis nowadays, because I'm still trying to get my first study up and running. What that means is that I go to some long-standing data archives with brain images, biological indices, demographics, the whole shebang, and just process the stuff and do analyses. The publications are easier to do and, frankly, a hell of a lot easier compared to when I collected my own data.

My existing grad student, AS, has been working out decent. I wish she had more neuro background, but thems are the breaks. I'll have her take a course in Spring. KM is rotating through the lab in theory, but in practice she's not trying out other labs and she just digs brains and neurological disorders. I do that shit, so yay. Granted, I don't know what her work ethic is, how conversant she is with neuro, and how the whole thing will suss out. But that's the pleasure of rotation. If she sucks, I can just say no.

That sounds fucktastically shitty. But there is a reason. My department is one of the few without paid teaching assistant gigs. That means, for a Ph.D. student hanging around for 5 years, I would have to fork out 150,000 unless they score a Federal fellowship.

There are some other rotaters, but hell if I know how the fuck that'll suss out. TW is the all-star pick of the year, but she's rotating through 3 labs and none of them have anything to do with each other. CM...how in the hell I combine my neuro with a gestational diabetes in moms thing, I dunno. I'm honestly hoping she just goes into the development lab. ES's grad student is also rotating, but we all know she's going to end up with ES. Still, she wants some neuro work, I want free labor and another publication on some Parkinson's databases I want to harvest, so who the fuck am I to argue?

Still have no close friends in Ames. Drinking buddies, sure, and colleagues I get along with. That's probably sufficient. I guess there's always trying to get involved in the Cam again to do White Wolf stuff, or volunteer for something, but my work life is only going to get more complicated and require more time the longer it goes.

Hell, I should be working right now instead of updating this thing.

All in all, life is much better than a year ago. I hated Baltimore. I hated the people, my boss, and especially my job. This is comparative bliss.

previous - next