How to Get Into Grad School for Bio (Matt Grobis)

Hello all,

At this point in the year, with grad applications closing and the waiting process beginning (or continuing for some of us), this post might not seem all that relevant to the seniors who have hopefully figured out how to apply for graduate schools. This post may seem early for juniors who are interested in grad school but figure they have time before they apply. Maybe the occasional freshman or sophomore who stumbles across this blog will think that grad school is so far in the distance it's not even worth thinking about right now. However, the following advice I'll share is to help you figure out what about biology interests you, a good thing to know for grad school or not, but will also help you get in if you want to go there. Also, some of these points have applications for grant writing and collaborations for those of us who have already sent our applications in and are nervously checking admissions websites too many times a day (or is that just me?).

1. Skim articles

There's a lot of research going on out there. The awesome thing about biology is how diverse it is: on one end of the size spectrum, we have DNA sequences and neurotransmitters; on the other, we have global ecological processes and evolutionary time scales. A surprisingly small number of people research cute mammals; fascinating biological questions can frequently be more easily answered by looking at fish, invertebrates, plants, fungi, microbes, and/or viruses. Even with the organism and field of interest set, the amount of radically different questions you can ask is astonishing.

If you're a freshman or sophomore, most of the literature (the body of scientific articles on the web and in textbooks) might seem pretty dense. Pick up Scientific American or browse online journals (e.g. the Journal of Young Investigators, www.jyi.org). What interests you? Are you gung ho about curing diseases? Are mangrove trees the coolest and weirdest thing? Are all the most interesting animals the ones that have been dead for millions of years? Figure out what your general interests are and read as much as you can.

2. E-mail a professor at your university to help with their research

Browse faculty web pages to see what kind of research is going on at your school. If you find something that seems pretty cool, send them an e-mail. Here's the format I always use when sending "hello" e-mails:

Dear Dr. ______,

My name is _____. I am a (your year in school) in (your major) and am very interested in (specific area within the general area the professor researches). I would like to help with (specific project the lab is working on) and am able to dedicate ___ hours a week to the project. Would you be free to meet with me sometime this week?

Best,

(Your name)

Details are crucial. Professors get lots of e-mails from students and a lot of them say, "I'd like to help out in the lab." This tells the professor nothing about your interests and makes them have to take more time out of their day to dig and find out what you're interested in before helping you get into a project. Make it easy for them! My advisor, Dr. Alison Bell, studies three-spine stickleback personality. Saying "I'm interested in animal personality" in an e-mail to her is like going up to someone at a party and saying, "I like rock music." In both cases, the answer is technically okay but... you could do so much better! Be specific. Most professors' websites list the projects they're working on, so find one that sounds cool and mention it in the e-mail. You might be redirected to a graduate student, which is fine. The point is to start helping out with actual research.

You'd be amazed at how things change when you actually start doing research. Dr. Cheeseman, the former head of IB Honors, once said that finding the research you like the most is all about finding the research you dislike the least. :-) Everyone loves the big results that get published and advance our understanding of science. To find that big result, though, many hours were spent hunched over a microscope late at night in a windowless room, monotonously counting the number of ants in Petri dishes in scorching weather, and/or fiddling with statistical programs and Excel. In every case, the amount of failure before that result probably led to some very frustrating days. If you don't like research, I don't blame you! And yet, in the middle of all that, you sometimes get a result that, if you're lucky, no one in the world but you knows yet. When you publish that result and people around the world read about it, they have you to thank for discovering it. That's prestige! Of course, don't get a big head if you happen to find a cool result... all we're doing is discovering patterns that already exist in nature. Yet, you get to live with the fact that you contributed to one of humanity's biggest drives: our desire to understand how the world around us works.

3. Do consistent work

Back to reality. If you've made it this far, you're probably helping a graduate student with his or her project. Sure, this part of research might not be that exciting (but remember that last paragraph!). Stick with it, though. Look at yourself from the professor's perspective. Your professor wants you to do well. They're where they are at in life right now because one of their professor's kindness however many years ago. However, there are lots of students who want to be famous researchers one day. 1-10 students e-mail your professor every month asking to do research with them (minor side note: it took me three tries over the course of two years before I got to work in the Bell lab!). Your professor wants students to do well (and of course help with the lab), but a lot of students will drop out once they realize the research doesn't interest them, they become too busy, etc. If you stick around, you're showing the professor that you're investing in the lab for, right now, minimal return. If you're with the lab for longer than a semester, you'll start to get sweeter deals thrown your way. This means authoring a poster at a research conference, being included on a paper, or eventually getting a project of your own. Keep it up! Even if you don't get published by the time you graduate, your professor won't forget how much you've invested into the lab. For someone who's writing you a letter of recommendation, that's pretty important!

4. Read!

Once you start doing research, ask your graduate student or professor for articles that pertain to what you're doing. This will put your work in context and save you a lot of time in looking for/through articles. Talk to a grad student or post-doc (preferably not your professor... they're busy people!) if you don't understand something in an article.

Outside of lab, set aside a little time every week to read an article on your own. It can seem intimidating to think how you can contribute to science when everyone seems so smart. Well, the best thing to do is just read as much as you can. Push through it, even if you don't understand everything. When I started reading scientific articles, it would take over an hour to chew through a few pages. The authors always referenced so much that I'd never heard of, or had perhaps heard once in a class but wasn't sure I knew all that well. I kept it up, though, and over time the concepts had popped up frequently enough that I'd learned a good number of them. When I first started reading behavioral literature, for example, I had a hard time remembering what the word "latency" (similar to "delay," usually before the onset of a behavior) meant. Every few behavioral articles I read, though, the authors mentioned latency to shoal, or latency to approach a novel stimulus, or latency to eat. Slowly but surely, I felt like I learned another language.

You'll find some articles a lot easier to read than others. The articles that come easiest to you probably cover topics you'd be interested doing research in! Check out what else the authors have written. If you come across a cool section in the article, look up the articles the authors cite and read those too. Over time, you'll get ideas for projects you think would be pretty cool. Look for gaps in the literature you could potentially fill with some of your own research. These gaps are usually manifested with the phrases, "...is not well-documented," "... poorly understood," or "... yet to be shown." Future Directions sections of articles are goldmines for potential research.

5. Do your own project

Once you've found something that looks pretty cool, run it by your graduate student. There might be a way for him or her to help you with your own project, or for you to use the research you've already helped with. Once he/she gives you the green light, bring it up to your professor. If you've shown that you're committed to the lab, the professor should be willing to set aside some resources for you. Be thankful! Hammer out a protocol (reading articles is also good for getting ideas on this), check it with a few people, and then start! Even if you don't get significant results, the experience of doing your own project will prove invaluable for later. Again... if you find that you liked working for someone else but you're getting lost or don't like doing independent work... that's completely fine. Industry research is less independent than academia (i.e. someone's probably telling you what to do) but usually pays a lot better :-)

6. Start looking for researchers to work with

By now, you're probably a junior or senior and have a decent idea if you're interested in graduate school. Before you run off to Harvard's faculty page to find a potential advisor, remember that in graduate school you'll be spending most of your day in your lab space working with your professor and the other students in the lab. Getting into an Ivy League school will look great for your CV, sure, but if you're working with someone whose work doesn't really interest you, or you just don't get along with anybody around you, you're in for a miserable 5-7 years (if you don't change your mind and drop before then). Consider your potential advisor as a potential parent. Is this person so busy that he or she can't devote time to you? Is the lab so big you're lucky if you ever see your advisor? It's easy to brush those things aside for the thought of working in a prestigious university or a big-name researcher's lab, but when you're in year 3 of your studies and desperately running experiments and preparing for upcoming preliminary examinations, you don't want to be left on your own.

7. Introduce yourself via e-mail

This is a crucial step a lot of applicants to graduate school skip. Place yourself in the head of a professor at a lab who gets an e-mail from graduate admissions about Applicant A who has applied to work in your lab. You've never heard of Applicant A. Maybe he's qualified enough to get into the university. But what if he's a total psycho? What if you let him into the lab and he just creates problems with everyone around him and hinders, instead of helps, the lab's research? Applying to someone's lab without contacting them first is like asking someone who doesn't know you on a date through one of their friends. Sure, it could work out... but probably not. Here's a template I adhered to when sending out my e-mails:

Dear Dr. _____,

My name is _____. I am a (your year) at (your university) studying (your major. Throw in 'honors' here if you've got it). I work with (head of your lab), researching (what you've been doing). I am very interested in (specific project the professor you're e-mailing is working on), specifically (specific details. Referencing papers the professor has published will look awesome here and shows that you're serious about this).

I was curious if you are taking on graduate students for the following year. I am currently applying for the NSF-GRFP and have included my CV and transcript for your convenience.

Best,

(your name)

I'll explain the bit about the NSF-GRFP in a bit. Anyway, be specific. You want them to be able to perfectly visualize you working in the lab and how awesome that would be. Some professors won't respond to your e-mail... that's fine, just move on. Some will say right away that they don't have openings for grad students. Oh well. Some, though, will e-mail you back fairly soon and will want to hear more about your ideas for a project. You have your foot in the door! Keep pushing. Read more articles, and feel out what the professor thinks is reasonable. One professor I e-mailed wanted me to have essentially an entire proposal by our next e-mail. Another took the approach of "so you're interested in this general topic. Here are some ideas about potential projects based on what resources the lab has. What do you think?" and had a bigger hand in helping me get to our final agreement. If you're not camera shy, I'd recommend requesting a Skype interview. Don't dress up, but look presentable. Come with plenty of questions about the lab (how big is it? Can the professor meet with you one hour per week? What resources does the lab have? Does the lab collaborate with anyone else at the university?). Remember, a good connection with a lab is a two-way street; maybe the lab isn't right for you! Attaching a face to the applicant, and really talking through your ideas in real time, can make the professor much more interested in getting you into his/her lab.

8. Apply to the graduate school and apply for funding

Science majors are pretty lucky when it comes to grad school. Humanities majors have to pay for the knowledge they acquire in these extra years of schooling, while science majors usually don't have to pay. There are a few reasons for this. In grad school, a huge chunk of your time will be spent doing research, and usually that research contributes to the lab and helps your advisor. When advisors write grants, they include asking for money for graduate students. Sometimes an advisor can pay for you to work in their lab, which is great. Other times, the university will let you be a TA for a class and will consider that as your payment.

But, sometimes an advisor would love to have you work with them but he/she doesn't have money. Or, the university doesn't let you be a TA (*cough cough* the Ivies). Or, even better, you don't want to be a TA and instead just want to focus on your research (and get out 1-2 years earlier). In any case, you should apply for external funding. Not only does it give you the possibility of coming into grad school with lots of money and the ability to focus on the research that interests you, it shows potential advisors that you have initiative and want to pull your own weight. The NSF-GRFP and EPA STAR fellowships are two big ones to keep an eye out for.

9. E-mail other potential advisors, apply

Self-explanatory. Don't put all your eggs in one basket! Applying to 4-6 schools is usually a good idea.

10. (Optional) Consider one-year alternative programs

Do you have to go to grad school right away? One great option to consider is the Fulbright, a one-year scholarship to do research or teach English in any non-US country in the world. The Fulbright has to be done with a "local" university, research institution, or NGO. Here's more information on that: http://us.fulbrightonline.org/home.html. The application process is similar to graduate school. You e-mail researchers you're interested in working with (though navigating web pages in another language can get tricky!). Tell them that you're applying for a scholarship that would pay for essentially everything. Over half of your e-mails won't get responses. That's fine, you wouldn't want to work with them anyway. Be nice to those who do respond... they're taking a chance! Be humble, upfront, and enthusiastic. Talk about the research you would like to do, how it fits with what they do, and hopefully you'll come to an agreement on a cool project. This advisor has to write a letter of affiliation for you, essentially saying, "This person and I have talked, it would be great for him/her to come here, he/she just needs the money." Then... apply for the Fulbright. If you're interested, e-mail David Schug (dschug@illinois.edu) or Laura Hastings (lhasting@ad.uiuc.edu) for more information.

11. Wait unbearably long for decisions to come back. Keep reading.

Self-explanatory. In March or April, if the decisions that come back aren't exactly what you wanted, consider looking at job boards like the Texas A&M board (http://wfsc.tamu.edu/jobboard/) to work as a field assistant for someone. You'll get experience, money, a better idea on what you're interested in, and hopefully get to travel somewhere cool. Then... reapply to grad programs! Or try something else.

It's been a very long process and I haven't even gotten into graduate school yet, haha. Maybe all this advice will actually lead you astray and into academic disaster. Hopefully not. If you're earnest, upfront, and motivated, there's little doubt you will do well.

-Matt

Edit: It turns out I got into grad school the day after writing this. Woo hoo! Hopefully that adds a little legitimacy to everything I said.

Now that it's over... (Matt Grobis)

Now what? haha. Summer vacation is lovely... get up when you want, sleep how much you want, no work, just fun... interestingly enough, I'm glad this will only last about a week. It's nice to get out the Xbox and play games I haven't played in months, sleep 9-10 hours a day, and not have the stress of always having to do something on my mind, but I can't help but feel like I should be doing something... more. I suppose in the end it really is all about balance; in the midst of paper-writing and studying for finals last week, I gladly welcomed days with absolutely nothing on the planner. Now, though, once I've blown up a good share of mutated monsters' heads in Fallout 3 I can't help but desire some sort of structure to my days.

Like I said, though, things are good. I'm leaving for South Africa this Thursday and I'll be there for three weeks. It's a program through U of I about wildlife conservation and management along with learning about the various ecosystems in the region. We'll mainly be in national parks and the last six days or so will be spent hiking and camping... very excited for that. Apparently the trip starts with looking at animals through bars (in an animal rescue center, for example), then looking at them through the Jeep windows, and then seeing them while actually walking around. There's something called the "titanic seat" on the Jeep, which is a seat at the very front of the car, actually on top of the engine area. All of us on the trip (~10) are fortunate enough to get a turn on that seat (:-\)! When we're driving around and passing leopards and elephants, I wouldn't be surprised to feel like I was about to get mauled at any moment. No casualties so far, though, they've said. I won't be taking antimalarial medication because we're going during Africa's winter and mosquitoes aren't active at this time. I did get a hepatitis A shot and am taking an oral typhoid fever vaccine from McKinley, however.

Speaking of Africa's winter, I feel compelled to share something. When I tell people I'm packing for my trip to Africa, they're usually like "oh, so you're bringing lots of shirts and shorts and sun screen, right?" Then I tell them we'll be there during Africa's winter and they say, "oh, so you're bringing lots of sweatshirts and pants and stuff, right?" Turns out that both sun screen and a heavy winter coat are on the packing list. Winter in Africa means the temperature is a little below freezing at night and then over 100F during the day. Yeah. That's insane. Layers, they keep reminding us. I'm really curious about the resilience and determination of life in this climate at such an intense temperature range. These parts of Africa are extremely diverse despite the seemingly unfavorable conditions. If the conditions are predictable and regular, though, it makes sense that something out there found a way to survive in them.

When I get back, I've got a few days to myself and then I'm off to U of I again to take some classes and continue research in my lab. Some of my IBH friends will be around so I'm looking forward to hanging out with them in a non-stressed setting :-) It's looking to be a good summer.

Finally getting some sleep and about to go play some more Xbox (while I still can!),
-Matt

Keeping a Good Lab Journal (Matt Grobis)

I feel like I learned a lesson today that IBH has been trying to drill into our heads from day one.

I came into the Sears lab today with instructions to set up some opossum matings + tapes and then prepare some primers for PCR. The opossum matings went fine; I've been doing this every Monday since the start of the semester and lately it's been going really well. I got back upstairs, hung up the lab coat, put away the keys and i-card (I'm still not authorized downstairs) and got to my lab bench and...

Now what? I stared at the two boxes of primers for a moment before rifling through my bag to look at the notes I had taken from two weeks ago, when the P.I. (Dr. Sears, the head of the lab) and I did this for the first time. They were brief and scattered but had immense holes in them - did I add the ddH2O directly to the capsules, did I centrifuge first (and for how long?) and then add the water, did I add 10x the mass of the sample as uL or nL, was DEPC H2O ok if ddH2O wasn't available? I actually got scared, holding hundreds (thousands?) of dollars of technology in my hands and not knowing what to do. Dr. Sears was gone and the other students in the lab were busy doing their own projects. I've felt guilty making them take time out of their day to bring me up to speed, the new kid who's just a weight on the lab until he starts pulling his own weight. I looked at my notes again but didn't know where to start.

Fortunately, one of the other members of the lab saw me struggling and came over to help. She gave me her notes (much better ones, I might add) and gave me some advice on what to do before getting back to her work. After a question or two for clarification, I started prepping the samples and in a matter of minutes messed up because I hadn't read my notes (and hers) carefully enough. This happened again twenty minutes later, probably because I was a little tired as well (sorry Dr. Cheeseman, I know I know).

When I finally put the solutions into the PCR machine and hit "Start," I knew that I needed to really get serious about the notes I took during lab. In IB 270 and 271, it's important that we take notes so that we can know what we did when it comes time to write the lab report or (in 271) do the experiment again. But in those cases, I was with other students, working together in something that at most will cost me a few points in the long run with the semester. Now I was in the same situtation but with the trust of a professor, where my work is really an extension of her work, her career. I was handed something worth enough money that messing up would make me look pretty bad. And I almost couldn't do it.

Dr. Cheeseman keeps telling us that everything in IB Honors happens for a reason (wow, replace "IB Honors" with "life" and you have something philosophical going on). Jokes aside, I understand what he means now... the lab journals, the sleep. It's easy to brush the advice aside when we're working late into the night on something we put off, but in reality the man's right. I don't want what happened today to happen again.

Off to Walgreens to buy a fresh lab notebook,
-Matt

April's Here! (Matt Grobis)

Hi!

Phew, what a hard week... and right after the typical "tough week before spring break," too. The week before spring break, we had two lab reports due in IB 271 in addition to a lab report due in CHEM 237. I got some last-minute Sears lab work and had stuff in my other classes, too, so it was a loooong week. I slept like ten hours a day during break just catching up :-) (it was glorious). We came back to an open-note take-home exam that I figured wouldn't be too bad because I had studied over break. Yeah right! Every time I underestimate IBH I generally get my butt kicked... that exam took a cumulative nine hours. When that was finally finished, it was 5:00am Wednesday morning and I scraped together a few hours of sleep before my 10am.

Then in bio lab, while most of us are brain-dead and exhausted, Dr. Cheeseman announces that in this lab, we have to design our own procedure to answer a question on differential GAPDH activity in green and not-green sections of leaves. We knew we'd be re-doing the first experiment of the semester as a way to check how well we took notes in our lab journals, but the "design your own procedure" made me want to put my head in my hands and sleep/cry/etc. It was tough. But, my group collaborated, we pushed each other, and we got it done. Then that night I slaved at a chem lab report and designing a procedure for a final project synthesis. I was so tired. But I got through it.

The week's over and I'm looking forward to some beautiful sleep, watching season 2 LOST (I'm getting caught up!), writing creatively a bit, and just relaxing. Oh yeah, and doing plenty of homework of course.

On a non-homework-related note, I'm pretty happy with stuff. Classes are interesting, warm weather is lovely, karate yesterday was really fun, I have a sub-lease for this summer pretty much set up, I won $1100 scholarship for my 3-week study abroad in Africa this summer, things are good with the girlfriend... it's all good. All the work may be tough, but I'm learning a lot and feel I'm getting a lot smarter. With sophomore year drawing to a close, I'm comparing myself to who I was in that car going home at the end of freshman year and I wonder how I could say I knew much about biology at all... especially the experiment side of it. Yay IBH. Well now I'm really tired so I'm going to lie down... then Chipotle at 3:00 with the other karate instructors. Can't wait!

-Matt

The Semester's Almost Over! (Matt Grobis)

Hello!

With Thanksgiving over and preparations being made to return to U of I tomorrow, I'm realizing that there's a week and a half of classes left. Then finals and... it's over. Whoa, hold on a second. I remember several points during the semester when I'd look at an Allenotes in my dorm (Allen Hall) and see that it was week 8, or week 10. The semester was one enormously long stretch until about halfway through, and then the next few weeks flew by. Crazy...

This semester has changed me, I think. I feel a little burned out... I actually laughed a few days ago when I asked myself if I really want to go to graduate school. What would the other option be? Stay home and play video games? Try to make a rock band and play drums for a living? Sure, those are sources of immediate gratification, but what's down the line? Deprived of biology long enough, I'm sure I'd start itching to learn more about how the world works. This all reminds me of that concept from introductory psychology... it's like, people have "lists" of desired activities, and things that are normally low on the list can actually move up if one doesn't do them frequently. The opposite thing can happen for things that one does very frequently. People take for granted their health until it's jeopardized... then, it's the most important thing in the world to them.

Anyway, this is a tremendous deviation from the point of this post. I feel burnt out because I've tried so hard and met such resistance, especially from organic chemistry... I'll be glad when it's over. And I'll be glad when this semester is over, but not because I'll be done with my classes. I feel that I have learned so much this fall, maybe more so than the entire last year. Finishing this semester will put a cap on everything that I've done so far and let me finally get closure on the last few months. IB Honors has been intense but it's been a flood of information and experiences that I want and that have helped me understand the world.

It was nice to return home and be able to put the books aside and do whatever I wanted with no obligations for a few days. After a while, though, I started getting that familiar uncomfortable feeling like I should be doing something worthwhile. This, I feel, is the reason I want to go to graduate school. It's easy to get lost in the work, sleep deprivation, and occasional frustration. The whole point of why one is doing something can be hard to hold onto. I want to pave the way into unfamiliar territory, into concepts that are still unclear and the textbooks avoid. I want to do something that others will read about and say, "wow." When I was in high school, in my final reflective paper in English I wrote that I wanted to change the world. Coming to college, I see that changing the world is going to be a bit harder than I anticipated. But give me time.

-Matt

Late into October (Matt Grobis)

Hello all!

I've gone home for the weekend and have finally found the time to write something here. This semester's been hard, much harder than the other two here. Science and math classes can be really time-intensive, so even if the material itself isn't hard, if it takes a few hours to do it, those few hours are going to be bumping shoulders with the time it takes to finish other homework. Result: very late nights if you don't time manage.

For example, our first lab report was due in IB 270. The lab, analyzing the relationship between two phenotypes in C. elegans, seemed like it would have a straightforward and simple lab report. My group took copious notes in our lab notebooks and the lab report rubric didn't seem too bad. BUT: it took time. A lot of it. I realized this at 4am Friday morning, when I took a quick break from writing to finish (ok... start) my orgo problem set due in five hours. How'd this happen?!

At no point that week had I purposely put off doing homework. I was busy doing other work, but the work was always just what was due the next day. There's this thing called "planning ahead" that you need to learn when you come to college, and if you don't do that, sleep deprivation awaits if you want to get any sort of decent grades.

I'm not trying to scare anybody thinking about IB Honors. Read the rest of this post if you want to get excited about it, because I'm really happy here. It's just a lot of work. You need to be really driven to get through math through calc III and organic chemistry in addition to tough bio classes. Physics, biochem, and statistics are probably going to be tough too. But the thing is: everyone in IBH is going through this. That night I was up late writing the lab report, I joked around a lot with the other students there and we had Jimmy John's together, making light of the situation. We're all stressed. We're all trying our best. You really bond after something like that.

Academics aside, let's get to the dorky intellectual stuff... I'm so happy! I'm realizing that one of my favorite parts of IB 270 is reading scientific articles every week. This week's article was "Massive Horizontal Gene Transfer in Bdelloid Rotifers," by some people at Harvard and the Marine Bio Lab in Woods Hole, MA. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is where a change in the genome occurs during an organism's lifetime, as opposed to vertical gene transfer, where two parents produce an offspring with a different genome. HGT is very common in bacteria but very rare in animals. In this one type of animal, the rotifer, though, the team found dozens of genes from bacteria, plants, and fungi. How could this have possibly happened? The article goes into detail about where they found the genes and how they could have gotten there; they use the same BLAST procedure that my lab group did to compare genes in different species (more on that later!) and analyzed where in the genome these foreign genes were.

I absolutely love reading stuff like this because it's so new that it's not even in the textbooks yet. I've realized that a lot of textbooks can be thorough but not very deep. They can cover a lot of material at a certain level of depth but they have to compromise that depth to cover everything they need to cover. A research article, on the other hand, is the equivalent of a paragraph of the textbook gone into incredible detail; basically, that paragraph is expanded into a few pages. Very cool.

So, back to the BLAST thing I mentioned. BLAST is a button you press on a website after specifying a nucleotide/protein/etc. sequence that you want to find similarities for. Normally this sequence you have corresponds to something in an organism, and you're trying to find related genes in other organisms. My lab group did this for our Discovery Project (I think I talk about the Discovery Project in detail two posts ago; check it out). We wanted to analyze olfaction and chemotaxis in C. elegans: ideally, knocking out a gene related to olfaction would result in a loss of chemotaxis. We found a gene in mice that, when knocked out, resulted in impaired olfaction. We BLASTed that gene and lo and behold, a near identical gene is present in C. elegans! We looked into a few articles on it, and nobody's done our exact experiment yet. Our semester project has been formed!

Anyway, on to other subjects. Orgo and calculus are hard but I'm managing. In my PSYC 433 class, we watched this amazing National Geographic special on Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford who works with baboons in Kenya. In the video, a comparison was made between his findings of stress levels in the baboons and the results of a correlational study conducted in England on stress levels in workers in particular businesses. Baboons make a good comparison because they spend only 3 hours a day on food; the other 9 are entirely social behavior. Baboon groups have strong hierarchies, and the study found that as you descend from the top, your stress levels keep increasing. Interestingly, the same result was found with the people working in the hierarchial businesses in England. The special then went into detail on the health effects of stress, how to manage it, why zebras don't get ulcers (that's the name, actually, of one of Sapolsky's books), and more, all intertwined with beautiful views of the savannah. Awesome.

I hope this thing hasn't dragged on too long. I'm going to eat some cereal and get started on orgo reading, which never ends... but at least it's good to be home :-)

-Matt

A Month into the Semester (Matt Grobis)

Hello!

I'm writing this slightly sleep-deprived and sick but intellectually content. This semester has been pretty hard so far... IB Honors is a part of it but it's more so due to my schedule. Dr. Cheeseman was right when advising against the IB 270, CHEM 236, CHEM 237, and MATH 231 idea. I'm not taking CHEM 237 (I'm in a psychology class instead) and I'm already feeling the crunch of bio, chem, and calc. These 12 credit hours alone outcompete schedules with more credit hours last year. I think that the difference between intro-level and upper-level classes is that in intro-level classes, investing some time and studying will most likely push you to an A. In upper-level classes, you need to really grapple with the material before you can confidently say you've mastered it.

This isn't to say that this year is very hard; if I've learned anything in college, it's that it could always be much worse, haha. I've just had to put down a lot of time to get to the level of understanding of the material I want. Orgo's going well and is interesting because we're learning the answers to a lot of "why" questions: "why does a reaction occur the way it does?" for example. I have a hard TA for calculus but at least I'm understanding what's going on (I can't say that for the first few lectures this semester, though, haha). Psychology is very interesting, too, so I'm content there.

That leaves IB 270. The lecture material is still largely review but Professor Whitfield keeps it interesting by asking us questions that make us look at the material a different way instead of just memorizing it and moving on. I really like how we read a research article every week and discuss it on Friday. We're learning about the biomolecules and DNA replication and this week our article was a theory on the transition from a lifeless world to one where molecules were self-replicating (whether this constitutes life, however, was part of our discussion).

In lab my group has been planning how we'll do our crosses to test whether two genes in C. elegans are sex-linked, linked, or on different chromosomes (or more than 50 centiMorgans apart). For the discovery research project, my group is thinking about investigating chemotaxis... but it turns out that C. elegans has literally hundreds of genes for this. Looks we'll have to either choose a different topic or filter through the C. elegans genetic literature until we find a chemotaxis-related gene that doesn't need to be knocked out with 20 other genes to see a phenotypic effect.

I've got a lot of work but I'm very satisfied. I'm not wasting time with any of my classes and I'm happy with how much I've learned so far. I've gotten to know others in IB Honors better and it's cool seeing them outside of class, going through the same work I am but still joking around and being positive about everything. Being around people like that makes me realize I don't have much to complain about.

-Matt

First Impressions (Matt Grobis)

Hello all! The conclusion of the first week of classes motivated me to write my thoughts here.

I'm working at some of the requirements for the IBH major, which include calculus II, organic chemistry, and of course the first IB Honors class: the evolution of molecules and cells. My first IB 270 class surprised me in how different the class was from any other I had taken before. Having about 18 students makes a surprising difference in that we're given options that just aren't possible for larger classes.

Take, for example, the fact that we were all given keys to the IBH rooms. I hadn't bought the textbook for the class by the time the first reading was assigned, so after dinner on Tuesday I walked to the Natural History Building, unlocked a door, and got to work using one of the textbooks present in the same room I would be lectured in the next day. As I was nearing the end of the reading, a girl called Phoebe joined me and got to work as well.

The next day, the lecture material wasn't as intimidating as I had thought it would be; it was review from previous biology classes I had taken but now there was a different approach: why is this important? I feel science majors sometimes get the label of just memorizing countless facts from their textbooks and regurgitating them for exams. Here, though, our lecture was placed in the context of the scientific thought of the time and how ideas progressed from Darwin's suggestion that "gemmules" accumulated in gametes and how phenotypes were blended to our current understanding of chromosomes and exceptions to Mendelian genetics. Ok, ok, so that wasn't all in one lecture but by the end of Friday's lecture I felt that I understood not only the material but also why it was important.

My intimidation, I suppose, was made up for with the research project we have for the semester. Producing novel, interesting, and important original genetics research seems quite scary for someone who not too long ago was one of the youngest students at the university (excluding those crazy-smart 8-year olds who go on to become doctors before they can drive). Original research always seemed so far away, like something I'd be doing during grad school or maybe even later. But maybe I feel this way only because I have nothing to base these ideas on. Maybe it's intimidating only because I've never really tried. We'll see.

Outside of the academics, though, I'm excited for the community feel that IBH has. On the first day, Dr. Cheeseman introduced us to the room we were in (and had keys to), pointing out things like the printer, the speakers that could play iPod music if someone was studying in the room, the projector that could technically play DVDs if we wanted.... I feel like IBH is much more than just classes. I'm looking forward to getting to know better the students who surround me during lecture and who I will very soon share a lab with. I know three people who are also in CHEM 236 with me, so IBH study sessions are imminent. The possibilities abound...

Looks like it'll be a good year.

-Matt

Rainy 4th of July (Matt Grobis)

Greetings from rainy Vernon Hills, Illinois!

This is the first post in a blog that'll span the rest of this year and hopefully far into the future. My name is Matt Grobis; I'm going to be a sophomore next year ('09-'10) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I'm entering the IB Honors program and can't wait to start!

I was an English major but decided I prefer biology early my freshman year. I saw the IB Honors posters in the Natural History Building and was interested so I contacted Dr. Cheeseman, the head of the program. We met a few days later and talked for over an hour about IB Honors and what I could do to prepare for it. Several months later, in February, I interviewed for the program and was accepted!

There's plenty to be excited about IBH. IB is "integrative" biology, which focuses to connect different areas of biology from the molecular to the ecological level, showing the very interconnectedness of nature itself. The IBH core does this in three steps, starting at the smallest aspect, molecules, and proceeding to enormous concepts like evolution. IBH classes have around 15 people, which allows for greater professor-student and even student-student interaction. I like big lectures, but I think smaller classes are better for grappling with ideas instead of just memorizing them. And I can't really comment on this, but according to the website, the IBH professors are pretty good too. Awesome.

IBH is going to be a lot of work but I'm looking forward to being surrounded by students who love biology. In a school of nearly 40,000 people, it's easy to feel lost in the crowd. Finding one's niche, though, really helps to make sense of it all. I'm not sure what I want to do with biology in the future, but being in the midst of biology professors and other passionate students, hopefully I'll get a better idea about how I can translate this excitement I have for the subject into something that can benefit the world.

-Matt Grobis

p.s: Happy 4th of July!!

p.p.s: I'm not trying to be a spokesperson for IB Honors, so if you want to get the full picture on everything the program has to offer, the classes, etc., look at these links:
Classes, specifics on major: http://sib.illinois.edu/honors.htm
FAQ: http://www.life.illinois.edu/ibhonors/FAQ/FAQ.html