Renewed Masters

It's been two months now since I heard the news that would result in drastic changes in my life. I never realised just how bad the news was that day. It took some time to sink in. When it did, however, that was the start of a very stressful period for me. I'm talking about the day my supervisor resigned.

There's a lot of details behind what happened, but for personal and ethical reasons I have chosen not to comment about it much online. It is for the same reason I have held off posting about what has been happening until now. Now that things are settling down it's time to start coming out with the news though. Many of my friends have known about this for a while now, it's just time I announce it publically.

So my supervisor resigned. Within a couple days I started talking around and within a week I was discussing the possibility of a new project. Ironically the first person I spoke to, Michelle Kuttel, is now my new supervisor. The main reason for the change of topic is that no-one else at UCT was strongly grounded in the field of my existing project. While it meant essentially writing off six months of hard work, I had to consider my long-term goals. It sucks, it really really sucks...but I don't regret making the decision, not yet. It's been a long, stressful ordeal, but I feel I've made a good decision.

My new project is in bioinformatics and is on protein-protein interface prediction. It's a graphics-heavy project with the new field of computational biology to learn. It's a drastic change from my previous project, but I have reasons for doing so. The plan is to get down to serious work quickly and get wrap up end of September 2009. It's a very quick masters, but after the huge setback I'm seriously determined to get this done and with my supervisor believing it's possible I will get it done.

Apologies for keeping this so brief, but I don't want to say too much publically about this. You'll be hearing more about my new topic though, no reason to keep that quiet! I plan on putting together my proposal by the beginning on next month and giving my proposal presentation a week or so after.