The finish line is in sight

I spent most of this week checking margin widths, indents, capitalization, and page numbers.

After a couple of reams of paper...sorry trees, I have successfully submitted my dissertation in the correct format. It's 243 pages of my blood, sweat, and yes, even tears, and I am so excited to be almost finished. All I have to do now is give my exit seminar and pass my defense...both scheduled for October 27th.

In the meantime, I have started a new job at the TREC Plant Diagnostic Clinic. (And yes, one of my new tasks is to write bi-weekly posts for the clinic blog, so if you are curious about plant diseases we see in here in south Florida, check out the link). The job is fantastic so far, I have several projects started, and every day is new and different. I still get to do research, but now I also get to see all sorts of diseased plant samples coming in (it IS fun, really!), and so I am seeing lots of fungi that I'm not that familiar with. I get to exercise all of my knowledge from all the training I have had to diagnose the samples.

In addition, I am doing some writing for extension publications, and I will eventually participate in some training events as well. So I should get some good teaching experience, and it's really fun to interact with the public, as opposed to exclusively working within academia.

I also get to go to Puerto Rico in November to train some collaborators in molecular diagnostics!