A couple days ago I finished writing my personal statement (4500 characters, ~1.5 pages single spaced) for the dental school application. After the blood shooting out of my eyes subsided, I was able to sit back and admire my work. There, in front of me, was a surprisingly eloquent description of my academic life from the perspective of why I think everything I have ever done makes me an incredible candidate for dental school. As far as the assignment goes, I’m content. I wrote it so well that I almost convinced myself that I wanted to go to dental school. Regardless, it’ll be submitted in a day or two once a few final things get processed. Once I’m accepted or rejected, I’ll have to remember to put a copy of it on here because it’s a real hoot. For now, here’s a snippet.
Although I intended to begin dental school in the fall of 2007, the admissions departments had other plans for my future. Taking my initial rejection in good stride, but still strongly desiring to become a dentist, I decided to expand my knowledge of biology and develop whatever other skills I could by pursuing a graduate degree with the intention of re-applying to dental school.
…
It has been my dream for many years to become a dentist, and following acceptance into dental school I will work hard to become a prominent figure in the community and a great example for all those who have similar dreams. My undergraduate and graduate school experiences have both equipped and energized me to pursue a career in dentistry, and the skills I’ve acquired along the way have prepared me well to pursue my dream of becoming a dentist. |
I know, right? Jeez. Moving on, I wanted to note something about my research. Things are progressing nicely, and I’m about to have my boss buy ~600 bucks worth of antibodies (a total volume of ~1100 microliters, or about 22 drops of a clear liquid). It’s crazy how expensive these things are. Yeah, I understand the concept behind the development of polyclonal antibody solutions – but I’ve never seen a detailed analysis of the costs involved along the way. When I spend $23 per drop of some chemical, where exactly does the money go? Anyway, I had a revelation. One of the most complicated aspects of my project is that the signal I’m trying to observe through the microscope is from a fluorophore that emits light around a λ of 498nm to 529nm, and that thick myocardial tissue is autofluorescent in this region. Yes, I might see a tad of labeled fibers, but it’s amidst a sea of background fluorescence! Today (since I needed to order some new secondary antibodies anyway) I decided to investigate exactly which regions of the spectrum were most affected by myocardial autofluorescence. I blasted some thick atrial tissue with the 405 UV diode and took a series of images with a 5nm-wide recording wavelength window shifted by 3nm each, then took the average intensity of each frame of the stack. The result (when graphed) was a pretty spectral representation of myocardial autofluorescence, which was incredibly string in the blue and green bands that I had been using all along. I’m going to order some far-red secondary antibodies, hoping that it’ll help.
After many more hours of writing code in python, I finally have some presentable data. Due to intellectual property reasons, I’m not going to include details about the method, units, or even samples I used. It’ll suffice to simply say that my method seems to be working well, and that the bottom line appears well outside of the upper band (and its respective standard deviation). ALL processing was completed ENTIRELY within Python. I used the python imaging library (PIL) to load data form the TIFF file into a HUGE array, and NumPY to assist with manging the array. Data was then graphed with MatPlotLib and placed directly into a PNG. Here’s an example!
Okay, it’s getting late and I have a project I have to prepare for tomorrow. I know my blog entries have become boring, dry, and overly scientific since I started writing again, but I have to admit that this is just the kind of person I’ve become. I don’t really write about relationships anymore because I’m kinda “set” in that department (with the whole marriage thing and all), and I don’t think it would be a very good idea to go about blabbing all of our personal life together anyway. Beside, these writings are an expression of my thoughts and (supposedly) not intended to be anything more. If my thoughts are boring, so are these writings. [sigh]
