On why I am not looking forward to classes starting...

This isn't just your old "Oh but I love summer, boo school" sort of dread (though it kind of is because lazy days by the pool are awesome). First off, I'm a creature of habit so having to switch from my summer to school routine is simply unpleasant. I've had this nice working-out, surfing the net, reading, cooking, evening shifts at the library groove going for the past month which I've really quite enjoyed but will no longer be plausible.

Second, I'm not looking forward to the stress that school and assignments bring, to myself and my peers. In general I feel like I've calmed down considerably since my middle school days where I studied and worried about grades non-stop. "Well that doesn't sound very responsible of you, since you are in grad school after all" some of you may be thinking. It's a work smarter not harder philosophy baby. If I've done a project or taken a test and turned it in, there's no use worrying about it anymore. I'm not saying this to discredit the worries/concerns of my peers (I certainly have other things that I will needlessly obsess over), it's just that when other people stress out, I pick up on that energy and then I start to stress out. And I've just enjoyed having such a nice, relatively stress free summer; it's probably added years back on to my life!

And then there's this underlying thread of competition that seems to run through grad school in general. It kinda sucks. Granted, I could just be imagining something that isn't there, but I'm pretty sure this is encountered everywhere, including in the workplace. How do you deal with it? You could take the bait and attempt to one-up every person that you met by listing all of your accomplishments. If you're like me you could crack jokes (recall the "stand up and introduce yourself" episode from last year in which I said I spent the summer waiting tables, hence my people-person abilities). Jokes aside, I might have to take up meditation or something though because school starts in a week! Who has 2 thumbs and is not ready for classes to start?!

Grumpy hamster is not ready for classes to start either...

Sometimes you can go back

I was fortunate enough to visit the Bahamas not once but twice this summer. Last weekend I returned with my team members to present our findings at the second annual One Eleuthera Health and Wellness Symposium, which this year just so happened to be focusing on cancer. During our 9 hour long conference I learned a lot about the biology behind the BRCA gene mutations (the BRCA gene normally works as a tumor suppressor, without it the genes that cause breast cancer grow unchecked). It was cool/humbling/nerve-wracking to present my work to esteemed doctors and researchers, but it went off without a hitch.

This trip was action packed, in addition to the conference we got to attend Tarpum Bay's (the settlement we lived in) and Hatchet Bay's homecoming celebrations. These were weekend long celebrations, kinda like a fair but with more drinking and jungliss (a Bahamian term for ghetto looking girls who look tacky, like they are from the jungle. both a singular and plural noun and verb, it's now a part of my regular vocab and I'm trying to bring it back to Atlanta). This was a bittersweet visit, since this time I don't know when I will be back, but the Bahamas, namely Eleuthera, is now a part of me and I most certainly will have to return. I'm missing those beaches and the people already!

Hello Eleuthera!!!

The narrowest point in the world, the Glass Window Bridge, with the Atlantic ocean in darker blue and the Caribbean in light blue.