School - all 10 years!

I love it when surveys ask for your occupation. They give you so many options, but for the past 25 years I've only needed one... Student. That's right. I'm about as close to a professional student as you can get! However, next Saturday, while you are all reminiscing at the reunion, I will be FINALLY finishing up my education.

I left SLC in August of 1998 after our exciting graduation ceremony for Kansas. That's right, the land of Oz (don't bother, I've heard all the jokes!). I moved to Lawrence to attend the University of Kansas. Those of you who knew me will not be surprised that I entered college as a genetics major. What is surprising is that, despite all my friends changing their majors many many times, I graduated in 2002 with a BS in genetics.

I loved college. It was the best. My friends from my freshman year of college are still my closest friends 10 years later. My best friend, Sara, married her college sweetheart (my other best friend Sean) last year so it was a lot of fun getting together with all our college friends to remember and laugh. Interestingly, my three best friends from college all went onto grad school and we're all finishing our Ph.D.s this year.

After college I moved to Iowa. Yes, Iowa. I've been at Iowa State University in the Genetics program for the last 6 years. The focus of my research here has been understanding the genetics of iron deficiency chlorosis in soybeans. Basically, I study the patches of yellow soybeans you see as you drive across Iowa and the rest of the upper midwest. I love genetics. here at ISU I have used the newest and best technologies in genetics. The background to this site is spots. That's appropriate, because for the last 6 years I've worked with microarrays and have looked at or analyzed spots on a daily basis. Essentially, each spot is a gene sequence and I look at the expression levels of spots (genes) in soybean under different iron conditions to see which genes change in response to iron. It sounds boring, but we've really learned a lot and I love what I do.

However, graduate school is over. I now have my Ph.D. and it's time to try something different. I'll be moving to Minnesota in October. I plan to study cell wall development and composition in Medicago truncatula (which is a fancy form of alfalfa). I'm very excited to be switching genetic problems and even more excited to work in Medicago. There's so much you can do with Medicago that you can't do yet in soybean so it will be a whole new world of genetics opening up for me.

I am sad about leaving Iowa. I never thought I'd type that sentence, but it's true. I've made so many great friends here. Many of my friends have graduated and are working all over the world. Three of my best friends are now working as geneticists in Canada, Belgium and Cincinnati. However, one of my best friends is still here and won't be graduating until next May (did I mentnion Ph.D.s take Forever?!). Who will I go to lunch with in MN? Who will I commiserate over science and solve all the worlds problems over a perfect chocolate shake from BeeBops with? Luckily, MN is only 3 hours away so I am sure I will be back to visit often.

I think the thing I'll miss most though is checking that box marked 'student'. At 28 I'll finally be able to check the box marked 'scientist'! Wait... do they have a box marked scientist?! And aren't scientists really just students of science? Maybe I'll keep marking that student box after all ;-)