Negative

I assumed from the lack of electronic message that my coronavirus test was positive, but I called the health center this morning and it turns out they just forgot to send the results. Viral RNA was not detected. I've been provisionally cleared to return to campus, though I should call the specific provider who tested me for the final decision. The timing is good because I was starting to run out of food in the house and would have needed to pay for delivery if I were to stay isolated. But I was able to go shopping today and am now restocked.

No Facebook app ads

Earlier this week I created a Facebook ad campaign for my app and got blocked pending verification. I filled out the reactivation(?) form at the time, but I got a response a couple days ago informing me that my ad account was disabled for a terms-of-service violation, which was not specified. After looking through the terms I noticed that it might be a problem that my app's logo has the same shape as a play button, but I'm not sure that was the reason. Anyway, I will apparently not be advertising on Facebook.

First day of graduate classes

Today was the first day of instruction at UT Knoxville. I would have had two classes to attend in person, but due to possible infection I attended virtually through Zoom. The genetics/genomics course launched into an introduction to rice plants. Overall this university seems to have a much stronger emphasis on plants than UIUC and I may need to do some reading to shore up my plant biology knowledge. The first biochemistry lecture was mostly class organization. After classes I spent the afternoon doing the first genetics assignment in its entirety to have it done.

I still haven't received results from the coronavirus test yesterday. Symptoms are roughly unchanged, still just a mild sore throat with occasional headache and cough.

Self-isolating

I woke up this morning with a minor cough, headache, and possibly sore throat. I had planned to stop by campus again today, but as the self-screening tool reminded me, these are all symptoms consistent with COVID-19. After filling out the appropriate form from the screening tool, I was advised by a university response team to get tested. I went to the Student Health Center; they took a quick nasal swab (not the super invasive kind) and a throat sample (for a strep test). The strep test already came back negative, but I won't know the viral RNA detectability results for another day or so. Until then I will attend class remotely to be safe.

Graduate orientation begins

Early this morning was the start of the Graduate School's online orientation. It mostly focused on professional development opportunities and campus resources. I learned about a center for refining teaching/learning methods, which sounds very helpful since I'll be TAing in the spring. I signed up for a 1-credit online class this semester called Best Practices in Teaching Biology. Tomorrow is the graduate teaching assistant orientation, again an all-morning online event.

Undergraduate research archived

 Today I attended an online lab meeting of the research group I was in back at Illinois. My mentor presented my recent figures and new work he did in lab. To preserve my tools in case someone needs to extend some work I did, I tidied up and cataloged all the files in my "lab work" folder. I exported my electronic notebooks from Benchling, added them to the archive, zipped the whole thing up, and stored it in a lab Box folder. This concludes my work for that lab.