Eusoniptera

I didn't do well on my last two biochemistry and last neuroscience exams, and I'm genuinely scared now. If I don't get at least 85% in all of the rest exams, I can get kicked out of the graduate program. It happened not because I'm stupid, but because I've been spending so much time in the lab that I was exhausted and had no time to study. (I did very well on the first exam when I didn't have lab work.) I negotiated with the rotation lab PI to reduce my lab load. Now my grades should come before anything.

Hi everyone, life has been treating me well. I'm having a lot of fun in the first semester of my PhD program.

Because I'm taking two very tough courses: biochemistry and neuroscience, and first-year students need to rotate through three labs, I now devote the majority of my time studying and working in the lab. The lab I'm in right now uses mice to study nicotine dependence. Yea, I feed little mice nicotine water everyday. You don't expect mice to voluntarily smoke cigarettes right?

I'm still working on the Pride of the Poppy Flower comic, but my progress is extremely slow. I figured that after posting the next page, I'll put it in a hiatus and work on the shorter strips because that works better with my current schedule.

I'm having some identity confirmation issue with the Social Security Administration. I'm pretty sure it has to do with that I use two names: my Chinese birth name and my foreign name, but they're making a fuss over it like they always do when people change their names. I had to call the school employment manager and they answered, "Dr. Chen?" "Woahhh I'm not a doctor yet! Maybe in five years!..."


That was funny, but with this profile picture I can already see how I look as a doctor no?
(Okay, maybe like this but more exhausted and annoyed.)

After 30 hours of traveling and waiting, I finally arrived Richmond, Virginia, USA (or RVA, the hipster way of calling it) last night. I'm going to spend my PhD years here. Now I'm in the same time zone as New York City.

I'm exhausted but my apartment is still almost empty with no bed to sleep on and no pots to cook with. Richmond is an important site in American history. The population looks like half white and half black with very few other races. The climate is warm and nice. RVA may not be as hippie as Madison, WI where I used to live and not as hipster as those big east coast cities. Shopping isn't convenient, but at least the city looks so laid-back.

Here is a picture of me in the medical school campus of VCU.

My first ever scientific publication is now available online:
Luteolin inhibits GABAA receptors in HEK cells and brain slices.
I'm a co-author. You can view the abstract here: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27…

Scientific Reports is not a very well-known or great journal, but it's something. This is important to me. Wanting to become a scientist since kindergarten, I feel like I've been waiting for this moment for almost 20 years! And it's a pharmacology publication. Worth celebrating.

Good news is that I got a new laptop: Mac Pro.
So far I'm loving the screen and how my drawings look on it. The colors are beautiful and look closer to how I intended them to be.

Bad news is that I found Mac does not approve all the art softwares, namely Paint.NET and SAI Paint Tool, I use for creating my comic drawings.

I've heard there's a version of SAI that works for Mac but it has bugs and I have no idea how it works. I'm sad and nervous because I don't want to lose my works or can't create comics at least for a while because of this. I might still use my old Windows laptop to draw before I set off to the US because I want to get something done.

Anyone has experiences of switching from Windows to Mac, has experiences of using softwares such as GIMP or Pinta, or have other recommendations or tips?