An atypical day in the life...

It started at 8 with an interesting talk on genetic analysis using microarrays, mostly I took away how you can tell when when someone is the result of consanguineous breeding (this bit is normal!).

Then we milled around a bit and some of us retook our official school photos.... I'm wondering if I should have left well enough alone but what's done is done. After that we were officially introduced to the incoming class and chatted a bit with them, possibly giving useful advice (one hopes anyway!).

Then back upstairs to mill some more. Members of our class began planning efficient student tours for tomorrow and more events were added to the social calender one of my classmates had put together. I added two events, a cheese class at Reliable Cheese (I haven't been there in a month! But I'm poor until student loans are dispersed again, so I'll have to wait.) and a drag show at a local bar (where my classmates might actually get to meet some of my non-classmate Durham friends). The milling didn't last long because the first years kept being efficiently processed through various things at Duke, and we joined them for lunch from Foster's Market. More chatting ensued and we tried our best to answer questions/remember what was useful when we were starting out.

Lunch ended and I headed across the street to the VA with the other student on that rotation this week. We knew there were large specimens waiting on us since we'd triaged them the day before. Slide sign out was pretty brief and we started grossing around 2:30.... We finished four long hours later. That includes our resident taking over the third station to knock out the smalls and triage a large specimen for tomorrow. We realized that if tomorrow goes as long as today did, we'll still be at the VA grossing when the official welcome party for the first years starts.

The worst part is when we were walking back to the parking garage and realized that neither one of us had loaded the decal specimens on the processor... So back to the VA we went to correct that mistake. Moral was not the highest after that, but thankfully I'm on rotation with someone with a good sense of humor and we were still laughing at the end of the day!

It is amazing though, to be the person grossing the large specimens. We'll be faster once we've had more experience.