This month sees the publications of our two new papers: An application of MeSH enrichment analysis in livestock and The causal meaning of genomic predictors and how it affects construction and comparison of genome-enabled selection models. The former marked my first collaborative paper with colleagues at UNL as well as my first experience with Animal Genetics. In terms of the journal, I was satisfied with the rapid turnaround time, which was the quickest among all the cases that I have experienced in my career. We submitted the manuscript on February 28th and it was accepted on April 2nd; hence, it only took 33 days from the submission to the acceptance stages! On the other hand, the latter paper required more than a year of effort to get accepted. The time and effort has been definitely worthwhile for learning how to clear the bar for publication in Genetics.
Another key event of this month was teaching. I gave a guest lecture on whole-genome prediction in a graduate level genomics course. Aside from my teaching assistant experience, this was my first formal teaching. The amount of time spent on preparing lecture was more than what I expected. I spent almost ten days to prepare presentation slides for the 75-minutes class. It might took longer particularly for me: Without any carryover from my graduate school stint, I had to pull together the lecture materials from scratch. Other than that, I guess the lecture went smoothly. However, I feel like I still need to learn many things as I am trying to forge a career in academia where both research and teaching are central to what I do.