A Week in the Life – Jacob Dixon

Jake is a 3rd year Master’s student in the Entomology Department working in the lab of May Berenbaum. His research looks at the plant compound resveratrol and its effects on the development of three lepidopteran (moth) species.

What have you been working on this past week?

These past seven days I have been working through edits my advisor gave me on my thesis. While my introduction is doing just fine, my results and discussion need a little work. I met with my lab mate Daniel this Tuesday to talk about my results and the stats that I used. It was a productive meeting; we talked about what had been discussed at my committee meeting last month, we looked at my results, and he gave me his thoughts and advice on the relevance of my stats and how to graphically represent my two-way ANOVA in ggplot. Now I am waiting for my advisor to respond to my email as I continue working on those edits. With my Master’s defense coming up in a few weeks and my expected graduation in December, I hope that I can focus on my work and practice good time management!

Here is the home office where I spend most of my time writing and working through edits. I will often decompress here as well, by playing PC games which I have come to enjoy as of late. So I spend a lot of time here…
What have you been listening to recently?

For this Halloween season you gotta check out Nosferatu by Paul Roland, it is perfect for the Goth time of year.

What’s a fun thing you did this past week?

You know I’m all about having some fun. I went to the GEEB Halloween party at Georgia’s and her roommates’ place last Friday (I was Bob Ross) and they threw a wonderful party with great snacks and great company. On Saturday, my co-op, Brooks House, was a part of a co-op crawl with several other housing co-ops in the area. We crawled from place to place eating and drinking and being merry and everyone, as far as I am aware, had a good time. Other fun things I did were a few outreach events. Last Thursday the Fab Lab on campus threw a spooktacular community Halloween event, and EGSA was invited to bring their insects for a petting zoo. Josh Gibson also came along and brought several of his spookiest and/or most beautiful pet tarantulas. On Tuesday this week I did some more outreach at Next Generation Preschool and talked about insects and spiders with 3 and 4 year olds. Most of them loved/were terrified of Cecilia, our tarantula we bring to our outreach events. Come on down to Morrill Hall room 205 and check out our outreach collection anytime and say hi to Cecilia!  

Cecilia the tarantula. Picture from EGSA website (https://publish.illinois.edu/uiuc-egsa/photos/?afg0_page_id=12#afg-0)

What is your favorite coffee place in campus? Why?

My favorite little place on campus to hang out and watch people drink coffee while I drink tea is definitely Red Herring. It’s a quaint little restaurant in the basement of the Unitarian Universalist Church right there on Mathews and Oregon. They serve mostly vegan food, they have great deserts, and I love working there sometimes when I need to get out of the house and it’s not past 2 pm (they open at 11 am and close at 2:30pm). I try to take people there when I get the chance. Over the years, I’ve gotten to know the managers of Red Herring and few of the employees, so I often find myself seeing many friendly faces not just sitting at the tables, but behind the counter as well. I am also not being paid by Red Herring to say any of this I just think it’s a great place.