I started school on Monday! I can say with confidence (right now, ask me sometime later) that this is where I’m supposed to be right now. I have spent 8 hours in class already, and many many more sitting in my 6th floor office distracting myself looking past downtown Denver to the Mountains. I am taking 14 hours this semester with two different courses:
- 10 hour Introductory Core Biology Course: Unified presentation of fundamental principles of biochemistry, cell biology, genetics, and molecular biology. Consisting of five 3 week blocks: 1)Building blocks and guiding biophysical principles. 2) Generating the blocks. 3) Building a cell: Cell structure and function. 4) Cell signaling. 5) Development, organs and systems.
- 4 hour Bioinformatics 1 Course: What is bioinformatics and why study it? How is large-scale molecular biology data generated, where and how can researchers gain access to it, what computational analyses are possible and computational techniques for solving inference problems in molecular biology?
Sounds exciting doesn’t it?? So far it hasn’t been too bad. It has been lots of reading (textbook and papers), some review of bio fundamentals, and memorizing things I forgot. So even though I spent 11 hours at school the first day I haven’t spent that much time since then. It will be work, but it is super nice to having something to do and somewhere to be. I have read 3..well…2 really interesting papers and 1 structural biology paper that I didn’t find interesting at all:
- Structure of the ligand-binding domain of oestrogen receptor beta in the presence of a partial agonist and a full antagonist
- An RNA gene expressed during cortical development evolved rapidly in humans
- Distinctive structures between chimpanzee and human in a brain noncoding RNA
In the new PhD students there are 4 (including me) in the Computational Bioscience Program and then 64 total first year students. In my program I am by-far the youngest one, everybody else in 30+, which is great because they have so much more life experience and wisdom for me to learn from, but I fit in great with the rest of the students, most of them just out of undergrad and a lot like Baylor (in 60:40girls:boys) so that plays good in my favor 
haha. So I am still getting to know and see where many people are from and what they are interested in. I have made it through 3 days of school so far and am still smiling, so that is a great feeling!
So in non-school news: Labor day weekend is coming up and COLLEGE FOOTBALL STARTS THIS WEEK! I am super excited for that, and my DVR will be full of glorious HD football games. I also have amazing tickets to the CU/CSU game this Sunday night in Boulder if I can find anybody to go with me…(anybody wanna go? please?) Other than looking forward to weekend I’ve been going to Grace Chapel. We went camping this last weekend and I have gotten to know many of the people there and see that God is doing some great things in my life and relationships so far. There will be more posts about that soon, get excited about those hehe.
I do apologize for the boringness(?) of this post, but I have to explain what I am doing to at least let people know what I’m doing, but I’m sure it will become more limited because nobody really wants to hear about that kinda stuff. So i just have some great words to leave you with this time:
Sic’em Bears!!!
