Kelley Bromley

While many people seem to forget the other side of school - this foreign “social/private life” seldom talked of - I myself am having some difficulty becoming the ideal grad student who does experiments by day and writes papers by night. It seems like a lot of people are that way though… certainly many people in my lab do this without batting an eye! It’s admirable, but I think they find it easier because their significant others, family, and friends are all thousands of miles away. Myself, I love spending time with Lionel when I’m not in the lab, and I have many hobbies which I find equally important as school to keep me sane, lol. I still feel guilty for not being totally devoted though… I mean, if everyone else is, what does that make me look like? Thankfully I am ignoring this fact because I know I’d just go crazy if I didn’t have “me” time, LOL.

I was actually talking to Blair about this when we had lunch on Friday. We went to the new Cafe Crepe on campus - the first time I ever got a panini and my god are they fantastic! I took Lionel there for lunch the following day, LOL - anyway, we talked about all kinds of things, but she pretty much shares my feelings about the “ideal grad student.” Basically what we’ve worked out is that the grand experience of grad school, from the classes to the supervisors to other grad students, has made us internalize this idealized image, such that we both feel guilty even when we are away from the lab, at home, watching TV! It was great to hear that I wasn’t the only one who thinks I should be cramming knowledge in my head during advertising breaks, lol. We don’t really know how this internalized guilt was placed in us, but it’s brilliant really - the perfect built in drive to keep grad students producing. We’re determined not to succumb though :D

In other news, I found out Blair has been dating a guy since February - a South African guy! She met him at international orientation (Blair’s from the US). She didn’t mention him until now because she wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a passing thing, which is smart in my opinion. It might be cool if the four of us could go somewhere to forget our daily toils, lol. Either way, I told her she can’t go wrong with South African men and we both agreed the accent is quite charming :D (Loves ya Lionel!)

Figured I’d post since I haven’t in awhile. Things have been going fairly slowly here for the past week - lab work has been slow because my primers weren’t ordered when Ke put the order in, so I ordered them on Monday and they should be here by tomorrow. In the meantime I’ve been working on the paper Xiulian and I are writing about BACE1 and BACE2. I think it’s going well. She originally did her part in endnote and word and I had a bit of difficulty converting her referencing system to mine so I could use Bibtex, but now that I have that all figured out things are going a little smoother. I just can’t stand the fact that it can take so long to do simple formatting things in bibtex/LaTex the first time you have to figure them out… I just hope people don’t think I’m slow because I’m so slow working on actual content, heh. The next time I have to use the endnote references from one of the lab poeple though it should be relatively easy to convert the file to bibtex, but for now I mostly just have the structure down and the flow of her writing changed, with some of my NRSC 500 CIHR grant intro mixed in. I think it’s going to be a long week… this week’s lab meeting was cancelled, which is good since I don’t have much data cause I didn’t get my primers, so this week I’ll hopefully get some data results and have the paper completed by Monday.