I'm not fired!

Hooray -- my ass didn't get booted back to Sweden today!

For various reasons, I normally don't blog about my work or the people I work with, but today there's definitely call for celebration. As part of the MCLS program (which I'm in) here at the University of Wyoming, there's a big exam at the end of year 1. For those of you who have the skinny on PhD'ing it in Sweden, think of it as the equivalent of Stora Tentan. Basically it covered the techniques involved in actually doing wet lab molecular biology (gels, pipettes, assays, screens, methods), the essentials of biochemistry and related fields. Needless to say, the scope of it all was somewhat... wide. And we were told that our continued employment here, and hence legal right to reside in the US, was contingent on doing quite well on it.

So I spent pretty much every waking moment for two weeks preparing for this nebulously described test of my abilities. "Tentaångest" doesn't even begin to describe what I felt the morning of Exam Day -- because you can always re-take it back home. This one was basically do-or-die, in typical American fashion. And after writing the damn thing for seven and half hours, I felt about ready to kill myself. Ten hours at the bar cured that impulse, but I still had to wait for the results all of last week.

Finally, at about 3 PM local time, the other shoe dropped. I received a boringly formulaic letter congratulating me on being "promoted to the second year of the program". A lot of stress dissolved reading those words, although I admit that the language used wasn't exactly encouraging. However, I imagine that the letter that about half of the incoming class got was even less encouraging: rumor has it 5 people got fired at the exact same time the rest of us were released from purgatory. I confess to a certain morbid curiosity about who it was, and by the end of the week I'll know. Actually, by the end of the day I might know -- as long as the shots I'm having in half an hour don't wipe that knowledge out. Have one for me tonight!