Living life as a entropy-driven reaction.

My life is on the brink of defying the rules of thermodynamics. Somehow things keep getting more and more chaotic and exciting, but I don't see any signs of it slowing down. Eventually, everything should finally dissociate into complete disorder, but I'm apparently operating on cold-fusion now. It's both terrifying and amazing. The things people are capable of really astound me sometimes, even when I'm the one doing them.

What I'm trying get at is that I'm now applying to present at two new research conferences. One is this next Wednesday and is being held by SURSCA on my campus. I'm excited about it, having attended a few in the past, I now get to present my own work. The one thing that is unfortunate about it is that it's limited to the students on my campus. Granted, it will still be my first time presenting first undergraduate-oriented research convention, so I'm not complaining. I'll just make a million dollars one day and donate it to my school so it can become gigantic and awesome and such.
Until I win the lottery, I'm looking forward to the second conference a little more as it is much larger.And by large, I mean on the national scale. Assuming I'm acccepted, it looks like I am one of the lucky thousands of undergraduate researcher who gets to attend the annual National Conferences on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) meeting. It's being held at Ithaca University in New York this year. Normally this would be a bit of a hurdle, considering the currently taxed state of my finances. Being a college student and going  on a research trip to somewhere like Taiwan have a habit of shrinking whatever funds are available to me, apparently. This may be where the laws of thermodynamics plan to bring my life back into equilibrium, but the joke's on them. It I get accepted to NCUR, it's highly likely that I can get a scholarship covering travel costs and registration fees. Then I'll only have to pay for food, and while I admit that I enjoy eating a great deal, that won't nearly be expensive enough to prevent me from coming.

I have presented at a conference before, but it was very different from a normal conference. This past June, I presented my work from the summer at the annual WiSys Technology Foundation conference, which for the most part was great. They provided travel funds for almost every student who attended, however I'm not entirely sure why. By and large, the conference was geared towards connecting PhD's with entrepreneurs and really didn't address the undergraduate researchers in attendance. That is not to say that I didn't gain anything from going, on the contrary, I learned a great deal of things about intellectual property, biotech entrepreneurship, and more. While I didn't expect any of it, the most surprising and important thing that I learned was the value many people place in appearances and networking.

Beforehand, I had the opinion that a lot of the "professionalism" at conferences and in non-academic circles is mostly useless fluff. It took watching my more extroverted peers to show me the benefits of dressing up, small talk, and generally being able to talk about something besides the inflammation pathway in zebrafish. I'm still much more interested in what a researcher has to present, but I'm also keenly aware of the difficulty they'll have in convincing politicians, business people, and the general public that they have something worth saying. Unfortunately, most people like the smoke and mirrors of a presentation as much (if not more) than the actual content. Live, learn, and let lie, I guess.

Visit to Bastyr. Part 2

Just a heads up, I gave the last entry a nice face-lift. Some of what I'm writing about in this post was in the old post and some of what's in the old post wasn't there initially.

Back to Bastyr:
The herbalism lab was not the only thing that had me hooked on the school though, but it was the easiest to describe. It's much harder to explain the mentality of the staff and students there, but that was probably what influenced me the most. What really interested me was how much importance was given to balance and respect, both for people and their work, but also on a large scale. One example I already mentioned is the award-winning vegetarian cafeteria, although I was unable to sample the food from there and can't say much about it. An example that was more poignant to me was hearing about how the campus recognizes the contributions of everyone on campus. Even those who don't have a pulse. Bastyr actually hosts a day of activities to give thanks to the cadavers that they learn so much from. Year-round, there are multiple paintings made in the honor of the cadavers hanging on the walls. Those that are more musically inclined can offer up original songs or other projects. All in all, I thought it was a really good idea. You can say what you want about the deceased, but you can't deny that people would probably feel a lot better donating their bodies to a place that does stuff like this. I honestly would like to see this sort of thing all over, if only to serve as another reminder that patients are people and not just a biological box of problems and enzymatic reactions.

I probably should have prefaced the above by mentioning that I once planned on going into the funeral home business. That ended once I realized that the last thing I wanted to spend my life doing was managing the family of the recently deceased. Research is a lot more constructive and interesting.

Speaking of, Bastyr is one of the leaders in CAM research according to my guide on the campus visit. She was corroborated by the research posters that plastered the walls of the upstairs office level of the building. Not only was it encouraging to see so many projects, but also the diversity. I saw work involving everything from leukocyte cytokine expression to dietary survey data. No matter where your interests are, there is probably a research project at Bastyr you can get involved in. If not, you can apply for funding to start your own. That last bit actually had me skipping a little bit when I heard it. Luckily, looking at medical schools isn't like buying a used car and I didn't get 20% added onto my tuition right then and there.

Actually, they might have gotten away with it. When I geek out, I geek out HARD.

Visit to Bastyr. Part 1

My visit to Bastyr University was all kinds of interesting.

Getting to and from there was just as eventful as the actual campus. My fiance' and I rode the bus together to the school she was looking into, or what we thought was the right bus. The plan was then, after dropping her off, I would make my way to Bastyr. Simple enough, right? We thought so too, until we found that the first bus we boarded was travelling opposite the direction we wanted. By the time we had realized our mistake, it was no longer as simple a fix as waiting for the bus going the other way. Instead, we had to finagle our way back on track using our wits, charm, and sheer stupid determination. Luckily, my fiance' was in charge of the first two. I tend to monopolize the last one. There was also a great deal of running, rapid map reading, and confused locals. Between racing buses to their stops so as to not be completely late for our appointments, the rain, and the general feeling that the ground was falling out beneath us, I'm amazed that we even made it to our respective campus visits at all. All things considered, someone could have justifiably called the nice gentlemen with white coats to take us away.

Bastyr to the Birds.

As you might guess, I was a little too frazzled by the journey before to have a really good first impression of Bastyr. It's a pretty campus, to be sure, but there is something about spending three hours embattled with buses and an ever-increasing amount of time after when an appointment was originally supposed to occur that ruins one's appreciation for those sorts of things. Fortunately, I did not remain bitter for much longer. Bastyr was far too sweet.

The campus is tucked away in Kenmore, between Lake Washington to the St. Edward State Park - it apparently stays green year-round due to its location.

It's also fairly new. The grounds were originally built in 1959 as the home of a catholic seminary, however Bastyr moved in during 1996 and finally bought the place in 2005. Interestingly, the school was first established in 1978 in response to political problems that arose when the National College of Natural Medicine moving to Portland. It was also one of the first schools to be accredited by the Council of Naturopathic Education. There's more history to the place, but I've probably got a healthy dose of nerd-bias going on and will spare you. Unless you like it, for then I will embrace my nerdery and spew forth knowledge like a geysers of science and obsessiveness.

The Chapel.

I was surprised to find that everything except the new student dorms (which are mind-numbingly awesome and environmentally friendly) are contained in only one building. It kind of reminds me of the white city from The Lord of the Rings. The front archway is the main thing that does it, but the portions of hallways that are open to the air and walking inside of the acoustically perfect chapel also makes me feel like a hobbit. I would demonstrate this using photos, but I realized upon trying that you have to be there to understand. That, or my brain makes some really strange correlations. (Peanut Butter and Motor Oil anyone?)

Fun fact, the chapel often gets used by professional musicians from all over for recording purposes due to it's great acoustics. There is also a group on campus that routinely meets up to make music in there, which is all kinds of awesome in my book.

The Front Archways.

That aside, the parts of the campus that really mattered were also fantastic. From an educational perspective, you pretty much have to watch your step to keep from accidentally learning something. The walls are covered with various research projects and other informative posters, but ground has something to share as well. Bastyr has many great gardens, both decorative and medicinal, all over the grounds. From what I saw, most of it was labeled with not only the plant name, but what it was used to treat as well. The gardens are also organised by various systems, one had the plants grouped according to targeted organs while another used a Ayurvedic layout. One garden even has a reflexology pathway built into it. If it weren't raining, I would have given it a shot. It's essentially a bunch of pebbles set into a concrete pathway in a pattern, and from what my student guide was saying, people have a varied reactions to it. She wasn't a big fan of it, as it hurt her feet, but I still  look forward to my next dry-ish Seattle day to try it out.

Inside the main campus building, there are multiple rooms for all sorts of class work. I only saw one large lecture hall, the rest of the building seems to be devoted to either labs, professor offices, or the vegetarian cafeteria. All three blew my mind for various reasons. For starters, the labs were gorgeous. I can't even begin to express how much I would enjoy it if the majority of my classwork was outside the lecture hall and in labs like those. Everything looked well-taken care of, shiny, and respectable. I wish I had some pictures to show them off better. The one that stands out in my mind is the food medicine lab, which is basically a very modern home ec room with science oozing out of it's pores, but no one yelling, "BAM" every once in a while. It's also painted red, if that helps any.

I also got to see the herb sciences lab where they were making tinctures with St. John's Wart to use at the clinic that Bastyr runs. Not only was it fun to chat with the herbalism students, who I must say I'm extremely jealous of (they're learning the stuff as undergrads!), but it was like walking into a room that I have wanted to make in my house for the past five years. There were all sorts of plants and tubers drying from the ceiling, as well as every plant part you could think of lining the walls in jars. The best part was the smell though. Imagine a cross between silage and honey, only better (because it's real) and you have the herb lab.

To be continued!

Subscription Madness.

After figuring out that following a blog on blogspot doesn't actually mean you get notified if there is a new post, I've fixed it. At least, I think I have. There is a sparkling new "Subscribe" button that will let you set up your favorite feed aggregator. If this doesn't work, I'll probably break down and just harass people's email accounts when ever I update. If anyone has any tech-savvy suggestions, I'm all ears.

Once I finish my sizable to do list, I promise to post more details about the itinerary for Taiwan. I might even be able to sneak some stories about visiting schools on the west coast as well, but that will depend on how much awake I have left in me.

When you wish upon a star...

You run the risk of being quickly disintegrated and undergoing fusion.
It sucks to be you, Pinocchio.


I have to say I still sympathize with the little guy. Building a trip to Taiwan as rapidly as my PI and I did was really a gamble. When we started the whole process, it was like walking into a casino and winning on ever slot machine you try. The better things pieced together, the more I was expecting Murphy's Law to kick in and shatter everything. I should emphasize that my PI shouldered a lot of the burden involved with planning it all. I helped when I could, but for the most part I was only responsible for figuring out how to pay for things and had much less reason to be afraid. However even now with only two months until we leave the feeling is the same. At least it's not entirely illogical because while almost everything has fallen into place relatively smoothly, all of my PI's and my effort might quickly implode upon itself with a single mishap. Now I just wish I knew what an example of such a mishap might be. One of the few solaces I have is that every passing day brings us one step further away from the destructive plasma of a excessive wishing star.

There's probably a reason I don't write for children.

Unfortunately, the passing of time often isn't as much of a respite from my fears. Early in the game of finding the funds for the trip, I found out after staying up most of the night working on an application for the Fullbright Scholarship that the deadline had passed roughly a year before. After that, I never forgot that the year was 2010, and finished my application to the Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship in record time. It's partly due to a small neurotic issue I have with being late, but after missing one by a year I've got every other deadline locked down so hard they beg for mercy and leak red tape. However, even when I'm aware of how much time is passing, who or whatever is responsible for my mental health still plays games. About a month ago, my PI informed me that he was inviting other students to come on the trip as well. This was exciting, except that I knew the difficulties they were going to have finding sufficient financial support for the trip. At this moment, we have been approached by five or six students who then decided they couldn't manage to come. Thankfully, it now looks like the two young women who plan to join us might actually stick around. Even more worrisome is that I won't know the full extent of my financial support for this trip until sometime in early December. Hopefully I will be able to schedule a meeting with the local Chamber of Commerce and persuade/beg for them to support us, as that would be fantastic.

It all makes me dislike the phrase, "Time Will Tell", as the implication seems to be that "Time Will Tell How Little Sleep You'll Get Trying To Fix Things".

On that note, Happy Halloween-eve!

Shattered Expectations. In a good way.

The past few months have been really educational for me, although the lessons have only come indirectly from school. Most importantly, the importance of taking advantage of every opportunity life throws at me has been made very apparent. Surprisingly, even the ones that are disguised as week-long marathons of research and sleep deprivation can help illuminate possible paths in life. It's almost like natural selection, with the difficulties in life either molding us to better achieve the task at hand or making us cry like a two year old mad that it can't figure out something simple like walking.
Being blessed with the tendency to really only enjoy myself while running from one class/club/group meeting to the next, I've had my fair share of both molding and frustration. However, I don't cry. My face just leaks from time to time, and that's what spackle is for.
When my face is not leaking, I'm busy not having much of life anyways. It turns out that when you find things like comics, Chemistry, and Chinese entertaining, research is a great direction to go. You get to be surrounded by like-minded people who, just like you, also have no time for anything. It's surprisingly comforting, and the dividends of your investment are fantastic. I went into working with my PI's zebrafish heart failure model only expecting to get good resume fodder for my medical school application. It turned out to be some of the best learning experiences I had had throughout my undergraduate degree, and once I re-established which way was up it was a lot of fun. I didn't ever expect to get as involved in the work as I did, eventually becoming paid to research full-time during the summer as well as part-time during my final semester. Most of all, I would never have believed that I could travel to Taiwan for my research. The thought never crossed my mind until my PI asked me if I was interested.
Before going to Taiwan was even an option for me, I was simply excited to collaborate with researchers at the Chung Shan Medical College so as to tie up some loose ends from my summer research. I had been working on characterizing a compound (For I.P. purposes, lets call it "Coolstuff") that had shown great promise in the heart failure model, but there was evidence that Coolstuff wasn't working as well as we all originally thought. Basically, all of my work over the summer looked like it might be totally useless. While that is just how research goes sometimes, it would still suck. My plan was to hit up the researchers in Taiwan and ask for help using the antibody assay they had designed to detect Aristolochic Acid (AA) in traditional Chinese remedies. AA has been known to cause kidney damage in people who accidentally ingest it - thus the antibody assay. Our model depends on AA to induce heart failure in zebrafish embryos, using the anti-AA antibodies would allow us to to see exactly how the AA was working. More importantly, it would allow us to see if the AA was binding with Coolstuff. I had assumed they would just send us the antibodies if they wanted to help us at all and then we would go on our merry way doing science.

Now I'm really tempted to assume other things, because instead of mailing anything to us, we're going to them. Something has to be amplifying my assumptions, this all still doesn't seem real. I'm waiting to wake up on top of protocol sheets with a micro-pipetter stuck to my face.

Assuming the fantasy is real, the work with the anti-AA antibodies is my main reason for going to Taiwan.

I think I'll start assuming that there are lizards under my couch, because I don't care about how much damage it will cause. A stegosaurus in my living room would be worth every penny of security deposit.

New Photos, Old Story. Absolutely Nothing to do with Medicine.

I went ahead and posted some of the pictures from my trip out to the West Coast this past summer. Mostly, it was to see how the slideshow gadget worked - and I have to say I'd like it to be a little larger. However, it was also a nice way to introduce some of the traveling I have done with regards to my future as an N.D. My wife-to-be and I drove out to Seattle, WA the week before fall semester started with the goal of learning more about colleges and general life in the area. The trip took almost two full days due to some car troubles, but luckily we were able to get things relatively fixed up in Wyoming. If we had hit Montana and the car broke down, I have my doubts as to whether I would be telling this story now. Somehow, the temperature was often in the 90-100 degree range the entire trip out there, which in Montana largely consisted of 50 mile stretches of road with no sign of civilization. Granted, Idaho would have been an even worse place to break down. In Montana the road gradually ascends the Rocky Mountains, in Idaho the road might as well be an asphalt fireman's pole. On the bright side, it's very possible to coast a car down the Idaho side of  I-90 and get some great gas mileage. It's just slightly nerve-wracking.

Morale of the story: Take the train unless you absolutely can't.Upon our arrival in Seattle, we found a great public transit system and seldom needed our car, except for when we drove to Portland to visit schools there.

We ended up arriving in Seattle some time around midnight and then collapsing in a heap. The following morning, we went to Pike's Place Market, which was great fun. If you're ever in the area and don't have time to do anything else, go to the market. You can find everything there, except for any kind of large store. The only chain that is allowed there is Starbucks, and that's because their first shop was at the market. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from there yet. You'll just have to go see it yourselves. Or wait a few years until I move out there and explode your screens and minds with the awesome that is Pike's place.

The pictures I did post are from the Seattle Aquarium, which is also fantastic. My lovely fiance' demonstrated her loveliness by getting us there on a slower day, which was very, very nice. A slow day at that aquarium is a lot like the first day of school - there were a bunch of people (young and old) who had no clue what was going on and did well just to remember what day of the week it was. If you can't tell, I have a slight aversion to crowds. I do not, however, have an aversion to the beautiful ocean and freshwater animals that were on display. I took as many pictures as I could without getting trampled by the herds of toddlers and exhausted mothers. The surprisingly large percentage of photos that were presentable are what you get to see.
 So far, my favorite animals at the aquarium were the otters, mostly because I never thought I would be able use the word "wriggly" to describe a mammal until I saw my first otter. The only downside is that all other animals are ruined for me. My 17 year old cat, while delightfully crotchety and annoying, does not wiggle. She only lurches, and neither she nor my apartments plants can crack open crustaceans on their chest with a rock. Yet.


Anyways, I promise I'll actually post something about Naturopathy, Taiwan, or something that's actually pertinent last time. The otters just needed to be shared.