WHOA!

The heavens parting and angels singing.

Halleluia!

So that, in a nut shell, is what my afternoon was like. The two awesome things that made me happy were, in reverse order, #2: it was Thanksgiving dinner night in Towers--good food! and #1: I'M GOING TO BE LISTED AS AN AUTHOR FOR A SCIENTIFIC PAPER AND POSSIBLY GET TO PRESENT SAID PAPER AT A CONFERENCE!!!

Got that? No, I didn't think so. Well, working in a research lab generally means the possibility of being published; however, that generally doesn't happen until you've been working on something for quite some time. But, alas, I have gotten very, very, very lucky. The American Chemical Society has its annual undergrad research symposium thingy in late February/early March this spring, and Patrick (guy who works on the other part of the HCV stuff) is submitting an abstract to be presented. WELL! I get to be listed as an author on that, which, in case you were unaware, is A HUGE FREAKING DEAL! And, to make it even better, depending upon what the ACS people say, Patrick and I may be able to do a joint presentation of the same project. (Usually, there is only one presenting author but we don't have enough data yet to do two separate presentations, yet he'd still have to include my data so I would be better at talking about that.) Hopefully, they're nice and I get to go, which would be an even HUGER FREAKING DEAL! Its in Chicago and Duq pays for me to go, I do believe, so w000t, free trip!

And to think, at the beginning of the semester I was pretty sure I didn't even want to do that much research. I thought it was going to be boring and suck. And now I'm going to get pseudo-published and present AS A SOPHOMORE!