The new academic session

Officially classes start tomorrow. However, our M.Sc semester students have not joined as those classes will start sometime in August.

This year I have been inundated with PhD applications. The applications started coming even before our M.Phil/Ph.D interviews were held. Only one set of results have been declared and the other set is yet to be declared. Meantime, I am being forced to take decisions.

I understand chromatin remodeling/epigenetics is the new "in thing". Just like molecular biology and stem cell and all the other fancy terms. Everyone wants to work on it. Unfortunately, the reality is different from the glamour. Really speaking my lab also does those very boring things like purifying plasmids and running agarose gels. The experiments fail, even the most perfectly designed ones. There is more sweat than anything else.

This year four of my senior most students have or are graduating. It is little poignant because the first students always remain in one's memories. They either make or break labs. Mine were fantastic bunch of students who helped build my lab up. If my lab is doing well then all the kudos goes to them. I sit in my office in front of my computer. They are the ones who have to deal with the vendors, failed experiments, and M.Sc project students and all the other load that I dump on them.

This week we are going out to celebrate their graduation. As I took a head count of the members I realized that we will be at least 15 of us. It shook me a little bit-that number. As a post-doc when I was dreaming of my own lab, I remember telling Brad, a graduate student in Charlie's lab that I wanted a small lab. Couple of students whom I would teach. We would do good work of course. There was to be no compromise on that because of my Phd and post doc advisors. Brad was a dreamer too and he dreamt big. My small lab idea appalled him. I wonder what he would say now if he were to see my lab.