Holy, ignore blogging much Batman!?

Hmmm....I think a "once a month" update is trending here. 

At least it's been a busy month.  Teaching, puppies, writing about research (or consequently not writing about research), not running, more teaching, marking...and LOTS of meetings. 

I had the first "formal" meeting of the term with my supervisor last week, and somehow I had to explain that I had no idea where the last 6 weeks went, and I'm no where near where I want to be.  He felt the same about where his last 2 months went as well, so we just shook it off and kept on going.  It helps that he's so laid back and lets me "fight out the issues" so I can catch my own footing.  I feel like I'm actually learning and accomplishing shit that way. 

My side project in Vet Med is going really too.  The surgeon I'm working with is putting A LOT of faith and trust in me, mostly because we're working on pretty much a pure materials engineering problem and he has no idea how to interpret the data or make sense of how to set up the experiment.  He just wanted to get one paper out of the project, the way we're going, we should be able to get 2 or 3....which would be really cool.  It turns out I designed an entire failure analysis, just like I used to do in industry, but because it has yet to be performed on this particular limb, in this particular layout.....I can publish a pretty awesome paper....as first author.  Shit, if I can come up with this stuff in after an evening of thought I should maybe consider staying the the Vet Med world and the "token engineer' on an ortho research team. 

Speaking of "token engineer", I was a little worried about my Ph.D. - where I would end up, how I'd get funding etc, etc.  I'm smart, but not brilliant, so my chances for prestigious scholarships are slim to nil, and if you can bring in your own funding to a Ph.D. program, you can pretty much do whatever you please.  Bottom-line, I thought I was going to have to start looking at other research teams and other schools to do the Ph.D. to be eligible for scholarships.  Turns out that engineers are hard to come by in surgical and orthopedic research areas and I have some Profs. in Kinesiology "calling dibs" over my expertise, as well as an invitation to continue to work with the Large Animal Surgery team as the "token engineer".  I'm really hoping that one of the opportunities will lead to something full-time, but only time will tell I guess.  Bottom-line....Opportunities APLENTY! Just keep swimming.