Nearing the end of my first semester...

The first semester in my Ph.D. program has been going great!  I'm just one final exam away from finishing my classes.  Most of my peers only take 1 or 2 classes per semester, but I wanted to start knocking credits off early--I have to complete 36 during my program--so I took 3 classes this time around.

1. Ethics in Research and Scholarship, which fulfilled a requirement of my program, as well as a college-wide requirement for Ph.D. students.  It's a complex topic, and this class covered some foundations in a broad range of ethical issues related to conducting research, many of which I had never considered before,
2.  Research Methodology & Statistics I, taught by an excellent prof from the Psychology department who really made the subject come alive.  Although I took a Stats class as an undergrad, it's through this class that I feel I'm really starting to understand it.
3. Soil Ecology, another great class taught by my (I hope) future committee member Serita Frey, all about the microbes and other organisms that live in the soil, their interactions, life strategies, and involvement in terrestrial--and global--ecological processes, including carbon and nitrogen cycling (my favorite!).

I'll be keeping busy over winter break setting up a greenhouse experiment I'd like to start as soon as possible.  If I heard him right, my advisor has given me the go-ahead to look into doing a metagenomic study as part of my experiment, which is an exciting and cutting-edge method of understanding which microbes are in the soil and what roles they're playing, which we can get at by determining what genes they carry and which ones they actively use.  I'm also scouring the scientific literature on the interactions between plant roots and soil microbes, and how these interactions affect soil nutrients, especially nitrogen.  If I can synthesize our existing knowledge about this topic in an interesting conceptual framework, I'll be able to write a nice review paper and try to get it published!

Next semester I'll be hitting the ground running with three more classes... Research Methodology & Statistics II (after which I'll be ready for some more complicated stuff... I'm thinking a Multivariate Stats class...), Microbial Ecology & Evolution (definitely looking forward to that), and my advisor Stuart's "hot topics" graduate seminar on soil carbon (should be really interesting, and I'm looking forward to taking a class with him).

Oh, and check it out: I put together a webpage for my lab!  It's pretty basic, but it gets the job done.  Visit the Soil Biogeochemistry & Fertility Lab and let me know what you think.