Decided on grad school

Yesterday I collected my thoughts about future plans and decided to commit to the Genome Science & Technology graduate program at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. I notified the coordinator of my decision and created my account in their system. They suggest that I get moved in during the first week of August.

Highly distinct

A month ago, I finished and submitted my undergraduate thesis to the MCB department as part of an application for research distinction. I have now received an email notifying me that I received Highest Distinction in Research based on my thesis and the poster I presented last year. Soon after, I received another email saying I've received Academic Distinction in the department based on my GPA in the major.

Remote lab work

This evening I started doing some of the remote computational lab work discussed last week. After a good deal of fiddling with alignment tools, I produced a figure (well, a block of monospace text) showing the equivalents in other species of the protein region skipped by one of our splice variants. There are indeed commonalities in that region.

Keeping the app running

Virtually all students are out of campustown, but the bus system is mostly still running as usual. A couple days ago the company published a partial data update that seems to be inconsistent with some of their other systems, causing a lot of departure information to vanish again. This has happened several times before, so I was prepared and able to work around it enough to get basic departure information. Interestingly, by AdMob metrics, app use didn't completely flop last month despite the lockdown.

Hiring freeze

I did some looking around on the Internet today and found reports of a hiring freeze at numerous companies. That seems to include John Deere, where I applied. I probably won't be hearing from them for quite some time. That's unfortunate; I'll need to think about other plans.

Back to class, kind of

Today was the first day back from break, but with entirely online classes. I only had one class today, but tons of other meetings and things to handle. The class I'm on staff for is mostly alright for now. We released another (pretty easy) segment of the semester-long project this evening, so I'll keep an eye on that tomorrow.

Thesis submitted

This afternoon I submitted the final version of my thesis. I'm now back in the Quad Cities for spring break and will hopefully return to lab work next week.