First School Year Down

Well, I survived my first academic year. It was rough at times, but I'm very optimistic about the coming years at ISU. My co-workers are great and so are the students. I had two great teaching experiences - a sophmore level core course in the fall semester (4o students) and then a graduate-level elective course in the spring. The graduate-level course was an elective and dealt with my speciality (Metabolic Engineering). There were 6 enrolled students and three auditors. The two classes were very different, but both were a great experience. Next fall I'll be teaching the same sophmore-level class and I'm eager to do a better job than I did last year now that I'm not so nervous. The teaching assignments haven't been made for next spring yet. I'm supposed to have one semester with no teaching somewhere in my first four years; but there are two other new hires with the same deal, so I'm not sure how we're going to co-ordinate the details on that.
My research program is getting off to a good start as well. I'm now supervising one masters student, two PhD students and one full-time lab technician. There were also 10 undergraduates working part-time on various research projects. This summer 4 of those students, plus 2 new ones, will be continuing to work. They are all very dedicated and it's rewarding to see them learn and get good results.
I've got three big proposals going out this summer, plus a few smaller ones. It will be nice to have more time to spend on research since I won't be preparing for class.
This year was great, hopefully things will only get better.