Living my last months to the fullest

I arrived back in Dunedin last Saturday morning, after an exhausting month of travel around America. Here is a recap of cities visited, in order, in a 4-week period: Pasadena, MD--Boston, MA--Ann Arbor, MI--Chicago, IL--Stanford, CA--San Diego, CA--Chapel Hill, NC--Berkeley/Stanford, CA--Memphis, TN--Berkeley, CA--Portland, OR--Dunedin, NZ. This travel extravaganza includes seven interviews, one 24-hr bout of experiments at the Stanford Synchrotron, one visit to friends in Berkeley, and my grandmother's funeral. I'm now very happy to be back in quiet warm Dunedin, where the undergrads are only just arriving. The day I got back there was a big festival in the Octagon with the whole town attending it seemed, which reminded me of the small community feel I get here. It was great to see everyone in lab again, and in my first week back I managed to produce a doubly labeled DnaK protein with shifting fluorescent peaks that report the conformational change upon addition of ATP, which has been the primary goal of my masters project. Now I have something to write about.

The interview process was fairly enjoyable, as I met a lot of interesting professors and students and saw three cities I had never before visited (Chicago, Chapel Hill, Portland). I was particularly impressed by Michigan (where I've been accepted!), Stanford, and UCSD. Michigan has a solid cohort of people working on protein folding diseases, as does Stanford along with a well organized MSTP and beautiful campus, and UCSD has research opportunities at the world class Salk, Scripps, and Burnham institutes.

My time in New Zealand is running out. My scholarship ends this month, so the faster I submit my thesis the less tuition I have to pay, although I'm hoping for a friendly grant from the Biochem department. Returning home will be bittersweet in many ways. On the one hand I'm looking forward to taking my research to the next level in a major U.S. academic institution, and from what I've heard the first two years of medical school can be a blast. I'll be happy to be closer to family and friends and good bagels. But I've had an incredible amount of fun here and really enjoyed the chilled out change of pace that I now can see in stark contrast to the fast-moving, consumptionist, ambitious culture in America. I know I'll be back many times later in life.