Sean and I have saddled our school bags for the last year of our term at BYU. It's been a pretty fun first few weeks. I'm only in two classes that anyone would actually consider real classes. One is called "How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper," a title stolen from our text book. Creative. It's really nice though, truly funny teacher who has a ton of experience, a text that's really clear cut and succinct, and no tests. We don't even have to write a paper, which seems counterintuitive but I won't complain.
My other class is Biophysics, which focuses on ion channels**(see below for details). The best thing about this class is I take it with Sean! It's been a long while since we had a class together and it's wonderful.
I also have a weekly seminar where guest lecturers tell us about their research, and the rest of my credits are made up of research. The problem is, I've lost all my motivation. As a Masters student, I have to have a project to work on that I eventually write a thesis. And my project keeps getting changed because all the past work has poor results. So I'm supposed to be doing all this background reading on my new project and it's hard to sink my teeth into it. And my head professor has never really thoroughly explained to me what we'll be doing so I've felt a little lost. But I just was given an "official" title yesterday: Effects of ethanol and anesthetics on behavior and GABA neuron responses in Cx36 knock-out mice. How 'bout that? Sounds pretty good. Maybe that'll give me the push I need to get working hard.
I've also been assigned a new job as a teaching assistant for Neuro480. Last year, I TAed for a lab class, which meant my job requirements consisted of assisting during the lab itself and doing a little outside prep work. That prep work involved maybe 4 or 5 hours of slicing some rat brains onto slides at the beginning of the semester. But Neuro480 is a different ballgame. Every week and a half or so, one lecture is devoted to reading literature articles from scientific journals. The students get three or four articles focused on a topic and be prepared to be called upon during the literature lecture to explain a figure, theory, etc. My job is to hold review sessions beforehand to help them be prepared. So I have to know the articles inside and out, too. Some of the articles are the same from when I took the class, some are new, which means I spend a lot of time sifting through all the details.
But it's actually been really fun holding these reviews and helping out the students. There's something really gratifying about preparing really thoroughly and being able to explain hard concepts. And figuring out how to explain something five different ways because different people need explanations from different angles. And helping someone to understand the implications of certain results. It's just really fun. I had one review session that lasted over two hours- my throat was sure dry by the end but I had really enjoyed myself. Maybe one day I could teach. I think it'd be pretty satisfying.
I'll let Sean make up his own post telling you from his perspective about the start of his senior year, if he so desires. I have a feeling chances aren't so high for that, though :) We can always hope!
**To briefly explain what in the world ion channels are, our neurons (nervous system cells) have a certain balance of ions (charged particles) on its inside and outside. The way neurons pass along a signal is to propogate voltage down through themselves, which they do by changing the ion balance. Thus they use ion channels to send ions out or in through the neuron's membrane. Um, does that make sense? 
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