i think i have now alluded to the fact that there has been a recent development in my life plan. it's likely that most of you family or friend-type people who continue checking back here already know that i'll be moving, but here is a quick summary of my plans for the next 8 months or so.
i found out in early september that my supervisor accepted a very impressive and deserved job offer from the University of British Columbia. when you have a lab, and you accept a job at a different university, your lab will typically move with you and continue on in the same vein of research. by consequence, your lab at the old university will close. this meant that before next June, the deadline that was set by the hospital/institute where we conduct our research, i would need to find a new home. i had a few options: (1) i could remain a University of Toronto student and just go finish up my projects in Vancouver with current supervisor, (2) i could try to orchestrate a transfer from the PhD program in Medical Science/Neuroscience at U of T to the PhD program in Neuroscience at UBC, or (3) i could drop back into the Master's stream here and defend my existing work in order to start fresh in a PhD program at UBC or elsewhere. after some very careful consideration, i decided that (3) was my best option.
i have had a really interesting experience working in my current lab with my current supervisor, especially in the fact that i've been directly introduced to the realm of psychiatry. because my research addresses questions about mental health and psychiatric disorders, seeing how the field of psychiatry works has opened my eyes to the challenges i'll face in my career, as i plan to interface my basic science experiments with the clinical and patient-oriented side of psychiatry.
with that said, i've also learned over the past couple of years that i think more like psychology, rather than psychiatry or molecular biology. neuroscience, or more generally the study of the brain and what it does, is a tricky label for a lot of interesting stuff that's going on right now. if you think about it, neuroscience is probably one of the only broad fields of study that incorporates measurements at the level of the single atom or molecule, of the single cell, of a set of interacting cells, of a set of interacting groups of cells, of a whole organ, and of the behavioural output of that organ. as cool as that is, a lot of the people who study the brain at these various levels come from backgrounds that predispose them to thinking in certain ways, as differerent branches of science have specific ways of viewing the world. this means that everyone working in neuroscience has a unique perspective and set of skills to offer, but also that it can sometimes be difficult to communicate in a common 'language' or paradigm.
to bring this back to me and my choice, i feel like it's important for me to get my grounding in psychology before i go off to be an independent scientist. i had a taste of psychology in undergrad, but thought at the time that i wanted to explore the molecular details of what was going on in the brain rather than the conceptual aspects of behaviour. as you may have gathered, this is what i've been doing here in toronto: measuring how stress and/or drug treatment changes the expression of molecules in certain parts of the brain. this is pretty dandy in its own right - i mean, only in the past 30 years or so have we figured out ways of detecting single molecules in the brain! but, i personally think that studying these molecules is most interesting when you consider their changes in the context of what the brain is doing. in other words, look at the molecules and look at behaviour. then use carefully designed experiments to figure out if changes in molecules relate to changes in behaviour.
and so, i'm applying to re-start my PhD next September in Psychology. i'll finish up a few experiments that i had been working on for my PhD here, and then write them up as my Master's thesis. i should be able to defend that thesis next May or June, and then i plan to move out to Vancouver to work with a new supervisor at UBC. although this change of plans is a bit on the unexpected side, i'm looking forward to the change of scenery and will be proud to say that my studies took me all the way from Halifax to Vancouver.
mmmmm... all-you-can-eat sushi.
