New Year's Day

"[Frosted] trees and window panes

Shimmering where tinsel hangs
And the butter light of candlesticks
Chases snowflakes off the bricks...
Everything looks better in gold and green"
- "Gold and Green" by Sugarland*

For as long as I can remember, I've measured time in school years. My year starts in the fall and finishes at the end of the summer, making New Year's Day sometime in August. I can remember much more easily whether something happened in 10th grade or 11th grade than I can remember if it happened in 2007 or 2008. I use phrases like "My second year of undergrad" and "The year I lived in Germany" instead of 2010 or 2012. 

I think I tell time this way for a few different reasons. First, I've spent my entire life as a student in the temperate latitudes of the northen hemisphere, so it makes sense that I've adopted a fall-to-summer schedule as my natural rhythm. Second, my birthday falls at the end of the summer, so the start of a new school year has always corresponded with my personal New Year's. I think of my last year of high school as The Year I Was 17, and my time in Norway will always be The Year I Was 24. Whenever I move to a new location, it always happens at the end of the summer so I can start at my new home in the fall. It's true: New Year's Day is in August.

When I was on the cruise just last week, I found myself telling the chief scientist that I was at the end of my third year of grad school. Almost as if someone else was speaking, I heard myself tell her that after the cruise, I would start calling myself a fourth-year. I mean, I did start in August 2012, but it seems crazy to think of myself as a fourth-year grad student. Of the three of us currently in the Young lab, I have been there the longest. Crazy.

I have a lot of expectations for the coming year - things I'd like to accomplish and things I'd like to see happen around me. I have a fresh perspective on OIMB now, so I'm bound and determined to enjoy my institute as much as I can before moving on. You know, in an odd way, this past cruise was the first time I came to own my identity as an OIMBer, the first time I felt like I belonged. It occurred to me that as one of the senior grad students, I now have the opportunity to define OIMB for incoming students. They'll look to me to see what OIMB is like - I know I did this to the senior grad students when I started - so I have the chance to make the institute anything I want. I want to make sure they meet an OIMB that is welcoming, knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and curious. 

I'm going to hold onto the cruise, to the community that blossomed there. I'm going to embrace the little moments that make Oregon worth it, like when I sketched invertebrates on a restaurant table with a friend this weekend or when she texted me a picture of her data. I'm going to encourage the people around me and take a few minutes now and then to chat. I'm going to relish lunch breaks with my labmates, cleaning days mandated by our post-doc, and every time my adviser keeps talking just so I won't leave his office. So many things about the lab now are the exact opposite of what they always were, and I'm glad to have a full year ahead of me to embrace them. This revolution could not have come at a better time.

Truly, friends, it is New Year's Day.

*Incidentally, my high school, undergrad, and grad school have all had green and gold as their school colors.