So starts another semester of teaching, classes and more research!
I always enjoyed training people at previous jobs, so I suppose it wasn’t so surprising to me that I would feel the same about teaching (after the initial terror passed, that is). I feel lucky that I got one of the few slots to teach the lab for the second half of the general biology course. We get to cover the diversity of life, sampling all the kingdoms throughout the semester. We follow the more traditional taxonomy (6 kingdoms) which is simpler for the students, albeit somewhat outdated. So, not only do I get to cover awesome things like fungi, cephalopods and cnidarians, but I also get to talk about protists. Unfortunately, we only spend one lab on protists, even though they make up a significant portion of the diversity of eukaryotic life.
In the lab, I recently emailed a researcher in Spain who is one of the few people studying the same group of organisms that I am. In fact, she agreed to send me some samples from her collection so that I can try to gather some genetic data from them. This is quite exciting for me, as practically speaking it will help to strengthen my data set, and I am just curious to see the results. I never would have thought that I would be excited about phylogenetics, but here I am, looking forward to processing samples! (Apparently I am slowly transitioning from a mild-mannered geek into an über geek…) Collaboration is a great thing!
Nicole Reynolds — 9/6/13