More forams

Met with my Professor today to go over what I need to get done before the semester starts. We're going to meet for another couple of days to review what I've gotten done. I need to reorganize my Thesis Proposal, so I can present it to a committee for approval. I also need to actually select who will be on my Thesis Committee too. Apparently I might be able to include Dr. Farmer on this, even though she is at Hofstra (and in a different department on top of that). That should be helpful, since she has direct experience with this kind of work. I will need to contact her soon to set up when to come to the lab and find out exactly how many specimens to pick for each level.
Thats the big task right now, picking the specimens. I started by trying to pick out G. bulloides from Jim's slides, I got through half of one section of the core and was barely able to find one. I think I might've picked too liberally when I was looking for Nq. pachyderma previously, and taken up all his G. bulloides. So I went back to my old slides and really started hitting a roadblock on just what defines which organism. I definitely picked a lot that weren't Nq. pachyderma, in the early slides at least. I was able to get some G. bulloides out of them too. But now I am not at all confident in my understanding of which characteristics define which. Yes, I have Kennet & Srinivasan right in front of me, but the descriptions just seem like they can go either way on so many individuals. I ended up spending a long time in the lab, but got nothing done with it.

Before all that I had to clear up an issue with financial aid. They had cut a refund check for me early in the semester, but when the TAing tuition waiving came through, they shut off the financial aid. That meant that the check that the school had cut for the refund wasn't being covered by my Financial Aide, so now I owed them for it. Luckily, all that needed to be done was to have a stop put on the check.
After that, I gave the biology office my probable schedule for Spring. Hopefully, I will be able to get another TA position. The professor in charge of doling out the positions had only picked up the student schedules earlier this morning, so they shouldn't've assigned anything to anyone yet. On top of that, one student that was a TA last semester isn't doing it again, so that should mean I am pretty certain to get a position.