As I mentioned last week, I recently completed my prelim for grad school, something to which I was neither looking forward to nor had fully applied myself until the very last minute, as increasingly and alarmingly seems to be my MO. Regardless of how or when it got done, it got done, and I’m happy as a junior grad student-peasant back in the lab full time running PCRs and sequencing amplicons all day can possibly be. As promised, below is my proposal in presentation form.

As I explained in the other post, it was an interesting experience to say the least. I wrote this presentation with the intention of finishing up and soliciting questions after 25-30 minutes, our allotted time. In the end, with all the chatter and arguments—literally—back and forth between two of my three committee members, while the third sat in the corner looking at once annoyed and inquisitive, it took about an hour and a half. Part of the delay was to announce the fact that the assumption upon which I had based my entire grant proposal, that let-7 and Ras physically interact, a fact which admittedly has been, as a matter of necessity, a very large assumption up to now, is completely false in the eyes of one of the committee members, and very possibly false in the eyes of the other. This made up the majority of the argument fodder, but of course, nothing was off limits for them. This is not to say that I’m unappreciative of their having served on my committee or that I’m bitter that they chose that exact moment to strut their scientific knowledge to each other; if anything, it gave me that much more time to consider how I’d rationalize a rebuttal in the face of their newly-revealed opinions, and it was rather stimulating in general, as they raised very interesting basic questions about what is known in the field, what is not known, and how to fill in the holes.

Anyway, I eventually finished, although I did have to unexpectedly provide the caveat that the rest of my proposal from essentially the sixth slide onward should be considered hypothetical and based on the assumption that the aforementioned phenomenon actually occurs in vivo, which is never something you’re comfortable doing when presenting, especially not when you’re supposed to be the “expert.” Fortunately, the prelim as a whole is less an exhibition of scientific knowledge than it is an exercise in thinking on one’s feet, thinking critically about previous findings and subsequent experimental design, and general scientific aptitude.