My Last Week of School

Well, it's officially official. I accumulated enough points in my classes to make the cut for As and Bs in each course. That means that on this coming Friday, May 10, I will be able to walk and get my mock diploma (the real one will arrive in a couple months from the printer). 

I'm heading down to Tucson on Thursday (even rented a car and everything!) and staying Thursday night, doing all the graduation-y stuff throughout the day on Friday, and coming home Saturday morning. My parents will be in town, so they're going to come to Tucson for Friday's festivities and then we will have some sort of party on Saturday. Several of my friends are also planning to make the trek down to Tucson for the ceremony too, which is very nice of them all! On Monday, my boss and colleagues are taking me out for dinner, too, so that'll be fun!

I'm really glad to just be done with it all and not have to worry about deadlines for papers anymore. The way my job is going, now I'll be better able to focus on work and doing good things there, and it looks like I'm going to be there for a while. I'm going to be starting a prospective research project with some of the neurosurgical residents at the hospital (by which I mean, I do data entry and they do surgery). That project is going to be about operating room traffic and surgical site infections, and will take about a year, but I'll be listed as the third author on the published paper. 

I also just got listed as the second author on a chapter in the Barrow Quarterly publication on acoustic neuromas. I edited the paper, picked out all the illustrations, and wrote exactly one sentence-paragraph in the paper, which got changed a little by one of the higher-ups, but my name's on it, so that's awesome! It's going to be distributed to neurosurgeons from around the country at the Barrow Symposium in a couple of weeks. 


Hopefully, pics to come from graduation, so stay tuned. I need to buy a real digital camera....