You'd think that since I'm only taking two courses this term, I would have lots of free time. French is not that difficult but I spend a lot of time outside of class working on the many assignments. It seems like a major one is due every other day. No, my mistake, it seems that way because it is that way.
My other class is biostatistics. That very word may cause some of you to get glassy-eyed, but not only am I enjoying the material, I'm learning new skills that I am applying to my own research. The class has a heavy focus on applied analyses with just enough theory to confuse and confound. Most of the examples are based on human health studies but nutrition is nutrition. Substitute "broiler birds" for "males aged 20 to 49 years of age who don't smoke" and you've got a winner!
At the end of each week, I return to the statistical analyses of my experiments and understand them just a little bit better. The math is easy, trivially so. But the intellectual leaps we need to make every week--ah, well, it takes quite a few re-readings of the lecture notes and text and homework problems to get those down.
Progress on the thesis must continue too. I at last feel like I have a handle on that. Even though the feeding trials are long over, it's only been in the past three or four weeks that I could clearly articulate my hypothesis and describe the two experiments in less than a billion stumbling words. I've always found it ironic that being succinct requires far more time and effort than being verbose.
I'll get the chance to practice my succinctness next week when I give a short departmental seminar, about half an hour, to introduce my project and dangle a couple of preliminary results. Two days after that will be my first committee meeting. I hope that the next time I see the committee gathered is the last time they need to gather, at my thesis defense in June.
I've got a title for my project now too: Enzyme supplementation of poultry diets as a tool to enhance n-3 fatty acids in human diets. Sexy, isn't it?
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