Super curious to get everyone’s feedback! Whatchya thinkin??? 👀

My first year has been an epic parade of First’s. My students, colleagues, mentors, and community 10000% make it worth it, and it’s these people that motivate me to get out of bed and get to work every day (okay, some days it’s the mushrooms too)! With gratitude, onwards! 🍄

Holy macaroni I am learning A LOT by teaching this class. I truly had no idea how much I didn’t know, but thanks to my mentors for normalizing this humbling sensation. I’m at the beginning of my career. Knowledge builds with time. And I am evermore in awe of my mycological and education elders. 🧵

I’m also learning to teach as a prof for the first time. I’m currently teaching the mycology class that I’ve been dreaming of for 10+ years. I have a decent amount of experience with very similar classes as a former student and TA, but being the prof is totally different and a humbling experience. 🧵

The students in my lab are AWESOME and it’s just as much their lab now as it is mine. Progress feels slow at times, but it also feels intentional and good and I’m so excited for these data-driven stories we’re working on to get fleshed out a bit more so we can share them with you all! 🧵

I made sure we had the equipment necessary to culture fungi and maintain my culture collection, and then I hired my first two students (undergrads) to help me get the lab set up while also fleshing out and finishing a project I started as a postdoc. 🧵

Being financially insecure for the majority of my life, it was difficult to spend my precious start-up money at first, and it felt really overwhelming to build an entire lab from scratch. It helped to take it one project and one person at a time. 🧵

…I’m very much still figuring it out, but I’ve started adding things to my calendar like “prepare for meeting” and “reflect on meeting” to force myself to take the time I need to process and remember everything while also forging ahead with good intention. 🧵

Time management is really real. There are so many cool fun things to do, and just plain necessary things that have to get done - and a lot of these come out of nowhere, with little warning (especially as a newPI), and it’s up to me to decide what’s important and manage my own time… 🧵

I’ve stuck with this career path because I am so energized and enamored with the myriad of things an academic can do in any given day/week/month - e.g. reading, writing, teaching, mentoring, forging collaborations, field work, lab work, computational work, attending seminars, traveling, etc. etc. 🧵

…i feel like to answer these questions I need two datasets from one time-period and area: (1) dataset with a lot of samples at one time-point and then, l (2) a dataset with, ideally, the same number of samples, but spread out across a time series

Testing for community assembly and membership - if you’re simply trying to detect all the organisms in a place, during a period of time - does it matter if you spread out sampling over time vs. space? Will you observe equivalent variation between samples across time vs. across space?