Need to start thinking about buckling down...

Inspired by the blog of a girl I used to work with in undergrad, I think a list of goals sounds like a good plan. I think the goal of this will be by the start of the school year...

Lab-wise:

1. Make the mutant that has been eluding me for years, or at least come up with some other ways to get it made. It's the last piece of my second paper.

2. Mass-spec some of the proteins we'd talked about doing since forever ago.

3. Continue to identify members of my regulon (this may never truly be complete).

4. Organize my strains, primers, plasmids and make digital spreadsheets of all of them.

5. Start getting protocols ready to leave behind.

6. (and most boring)- make Tables of Contents for all my lab notebooks - something I'm going to seriously regret not doing as I went- I am about to start Notebook #13)

Writing-wise:

1. Get the first paper resubmitted. Basically, bug my advisor until it happens.

2. Get a draft of the second paper done (leaving appropriate holes for when that mutant gets made).

3. Have at least a draft of every chapter of my thesis (This is probably impossible. I could be ok with a draft of my intro chapter and my two main papers, a really rough draft of the third main paper, and outlines of all my appendices).

4. Set a date for my defense. Also going to be tricky to do w/ no advisor around...

Post-doc exploration:

1. Make a short list of people I'm interested in contacting. Read info about them and figure out how I might fit in their research.

2. Update my CV, and start drafting "cover emails."

3. This is the tricky part, because my advisor is gone for three weeks starting the end of July, but decide who will write my recommendation letters, and get their ok to be my references.

Life-wise

1. Survive being maid-of-honor in this crazy wedding next weekend.

2. Keep walking/running, and try not to revert to crazy studying snacking with no exercise. I don't need to gain any thesis weight...

3. Set aside some money for a small trip after my defense.

4. Just try to keep some balance between crazy graduating and sanity.