First lecture

Yesterday was my first Biomaterials class (BioE 801). Just an intro to the class so nothing too big. The list of topics the class covers looks pretty cool though: ceramics, polymers, bioactive materials, biochemical, cell and tissue interactions, a little bit of tissue engineering. 5 other students in the class with me. A passing C is > 70%, but grad students are expected to maintain > B grade average (> 80%).

I have a seminar class Monday afternoons and for the month of September, Monday, Friday and Saturday Research Principles course through MUSC.

I see lots of reading in my future.

Not so mandatory orientation

Made the road trip up to Clemson Sunday so I could go to the grad student orientation for the Bioengineering department on Monday. Brought the bike with me so I could ride it around campus and explore a bit.

Biking around Clemson turned out to be a good deal more challenging than I expected. My brain seems to have forgotten that it’s been well over 13 years since my body did any serious cycling.

Sunday afternoon I spent a couple of hours getting lost riding around the campus. I had meant to try to find the Rhodes Engineering building where the orientation was supposed to be, but I missed the left turn at Albequerque and got lost in one of the many residence areas. Fun riding around, but the campus turns out to be a lot hillier than I was expecting. Wasn’t much good for anything else after all that riding.

Monday morning I got back on the bike despite my protesting sore butt (think a new seat for the bike is in order) and rode around a little bit more. Made a stop at the book store to pick up the texts for my Biomaterials course and also managed to find the Rhodes building. Killed a few more hours and then it was time for the orientation in the brand new bioengineering building.

Turns out the mandatory orientation wasn’t so mandatory for those of us in the Clemson/MUSC joint program, although they did seem to appreciate the fact that I made the trip up for it. The trip wasn’t entirely useless though. I did get to meet some of the other grad students, some of the faculty and the grad student coordinator. She’s the most important person of all to get to know because she’s the one that Knows Stuff.

Apparently there’s an MUSC orientation that I need to go to next week. I wonder how mandatory that one is.

Hello PhD

A letter from Clemson‘s Bioengineering department arrived in my email today telling me that I’ve been accepted to the PhD program.

Woohoo!

This is going to be a pretty major undertaking for me but I’m looking forward to it.

Now to figure out how to pay for it.

Back to regularly scheduled programming

Whew, GRE is over and done with now. Time to get back to everything else that I’m supposed to be doing.

The exam turned out to be not too bad, although my score on the verbal portion wasn’t quite as high as I expected. I’m pretty sure if I had put a little more effort into preparing, I could have done better. Fortunately I’m in a position where doing well on the GRE doesn’t really matter. If I ended up crashing and burning on the GRE and Clemson decided I didn’t meet their GRE standards, not the end of the world. I just continue on working and life goes on.

Glad it’s all over now. To celebrate, I think I’ll head out to the Terrace Hippodrome and catch Star Trek one more time. I’ll be there for the 8PM show if anybody wants to join me.