So, I've been back from Colorado for over a week now, and I figured I'd better post about the career development conference/institute that I attended out there. First off, it was a blast. We had randomly assigned roommates, which I was frankly pretty worried about, but mine pretty much rocked! ;) Tara is a southern girl who likes Sex and the City, deep fried food, and wine, oh, and she researches HIV, so we could talk about various female research areas that we had in common.
On top of that, we were split into groups of three or four to review grant proposals and do presentations of our research. It just so happens that the two other guys that were in my group were also cool. And the first two nights our group was working on presentations with Tara's group, so we all hit it off together right away. Basically our days were like this: get up at 6am, shower, get dressed, grab breakfast buffet in the hotel (we had an outdoor patio with a beautiful waterfall to watch), head up to campus and sit through seminars all day long (until 9pm most nights!), then back to the hotel where we either A) drank in the hotel sports bar with the faculty, B) ran to the nearby liquor store and grabbed wine and beer, then headed back to the outdoor patio to drink, which both times resulted in us ordering a 24" pizza around midnight, or C) headed to "downtown" Boulder to hit the bars. All in all, I learned a lot about my career options after grad school (most of which, I'm happy to say, I've heard about through our fairly new MICaB career development program) and even more about grant writing, the review process, and tips on how to find a post-doc. Whew! The best part of the whole experience was just meeting so many other grad students (and some post-docs) that are having similar problems regarding what to do next (or at least after a post-doc). We spent a lot of time talking science and our research, but even more time talking about what we want out of our careers.
But...just a few crazy stories (because there's always something...). One of the first nights, we had just wrapped up and I ran up to the room to change before meeting people back in the hotel bar. I noticed something dark on my tennis shoes, which I hadn't actually worn yet. I picked up my shoe to find a dead bat on it!! I probably would have screamed, had I not been pretty sure it was dead (considering I was moving it around on the shoe quite a bit!). I called down to the front desk to have someone take care of it, the guy I get on the phone says he's checking someone in so he needs to call me back (!), which he does while I'm oh-so-impatiently waiting. He spends time trying to find a new room to move us into, when I finally just tell him that if he'd send someone up to just get rid of the bat, I'd be more than happy to stay in the room (what are the odds of finding another one in there, after all?). He said he'd send one of their "engineers" up to deal with. Meanwhile, I call David to fill him in on the situation, and my roomie walks in the door while I'm on the phone - I hurriedly get David off the phone so that I can tell her what's going on before she sees the dead bat herself. She thought it was hilarious, and proceeded to take pictures of it - and then called down to the hotel bar to tell the others that they should come up and see! Unfortunately the "engineer" came by before they could make it, but at least we had the pictures to prove it!
That same night, after a little too much wine (and our first 24" pizza!),
we were wandering back to our room and came across a toilet seat (plus lid) in our hallway. It, along with a lampshade and some sort of heating duct, had been in our hallway for the past two days, so we decided we should take it and hang it on the guys' door. Unfortunately we didn't know their room number, so we had to wait until the next day, when after multiple attempts we finally managed to get their room number out of them without them suspecting anything. We decided it would be funny to put the Batman logo on the toilet (what with the bat situation and all), so we drew one and attached it to the toilet lid with gum. We were all meeting in the hotel lobby that night to head downtown for sushi and drinking, so we waited until the last possible moment to leave and then ran up to their room to hang the toilet on their door. Of course, we ran into two people, one of which worked for the hotel - but he left it there, so no worries! That night, after closing down the bar with the guys, I had the opportunity to watch them find the toilet seat by their door (it had fallen off the door handle). It was pretty funny.
Oh and, after some conversation concerning the toilet seat later in the week, we decided that someone had to take the seat with them so that it could be circulated among the group. So what happened when Tara and I go to leave on Thursday morning? The toilet seat was out in the hallway- one door down from our room (they must've watched us walk back to our room one night and made a pretty good guess!). So...I took one for the team and packed that thing in my suitcase! :) It was a really heavy toilet seat, so I was concerned that my suitcase would be over the weight limit, but it was 48.5 lbs!! And now I have a toilet seat under my bed...waiting for the first one of our group to defend their thesis....
Day 2: Run to Menards to purchase supplies and rent a floor sander. Sand ALL DAY LONG - using the floor sander and a portable hand-held sander. (I seriously had no grip strength left by the end of the day!)
Day 3: Stain floor. Let dry.
