Chapter 6: Friday 20 May 2022

The next morning, Larissa had to get a covid test as part of entry requirements to USA, so she was a little late for her first lecture. She’d forgotten what that was like, getting a swab jammed up her nostrils, since she no longer had to do that regularly. Later today she’d find out whether they were going to USA the next day - the trip would fall through if any of them tested positive - Neither Layna nor Larissa would go to USA without their guys, and no point if they weren’t going.

She sat in her lecture learning more about marine biology. Really interesting stuff, and she was looking forward to her practical experience - all lined up for July with a university on the coast of Northern Queensland who thought that having Larissa lecture a few times on emergency vet medicine was a pretty good exchange for letting her handle marine mammals and fish by helping them in their research facility and wildlife treatment centre. Well, and Layna would be coming visit to talk about the environment too. They had adopted the university as their loose base for the Queensland work.

While she did that, she reviewed her presentation: today she was presenting on her project to the rest of her final year project groups. Her position was a bit of an anomaly for the rest of the students. She’d jumped a year to do it with them, and she didn’t know them, wasn’t part of one of their groups. And her project was more theoretical than the ones they were doing ... but that was because she handled animals for real daily or weekly, something that they hadn’t done. She sat in the project lab with them, working on her cases and data, and they ignored her. Until she started helping them with hard won experience around animal handling. So they’d warmed to her, but still felt of her as an outsider, and all the noise around her and also Layna’s project hadn’t helped her belong to the group, even if most of them followed her obsessively. Hell, most of the uni followed both her and Layna obsessively now. Would she change their opinion today, start to be part of the group? She wasn’t sure. Her task today was to make a clear presentation of her project, what the research question was, how she was going about it, and what challenges she had. It was worth 15% of her overall mark, and she’d put quite a bit of work into it.

Once her marine biology lecture finished, she trooped off to the lecture room for her presentation. She was standing out the front getting her presentation and spreadsheets lined up when Julian walked in. The project work coordinator, a nice guy, but very fastidious, said, “Hey, you’re in the wrong place. This is AM 426 here. Where are you supposed to be?”

Julian stopped, surprised, and said, “I’m supposed to be here, at least, this is where I want to be. Is that OK?”

“Umm. I suppose. Why do you want to be here?” It was sort of a reasonable question, but the coordinator must have been having a bad day, because it wasn’t asked in a reasonable way at all.

Julian said in a serious tone, “I heard about this research, I think it shouldn’t have got ethics approval, so I want to know about it, in case I need to protest about its animal cruelty.”

Larissa nearly laughed out loud. She watched the poor course coordinator nearly have apoplexy. “Throw the bum out,” she cried out loudly. “We don’t want riff-raff like that in here. Next he’ll be telling you he’s some radical YouTuber who’s always getting in trouble around here.”

“Well, if I have to,” Julian said. “I have been known to commit acts of violence on YouTube. Quite famous for it, in fact.” He paused, and Larissa tried to guess what would come next in this game. Then Julian said, “But you know, I’m also kind of famous for giving the presenter a good kissing on Youtube too.”

The rest of the class burst into laughter for that. The coordinator looked around at Larissa in surprise, so she said, “Pfft. Would I kiss this nerd? I don’t think so. He’d have to tie me up for sure.” She turned to the class. “Well, you guys, your call. What should we do? Should I let the guy kiss me and get to this, or do we all throw the bum out?”

The class was split. Some were calling out for a kiss. Some were shouting to throw the bum out. And some were for both. All of them were enjoying this greatly too. At this point, the dean walked in, and everyone shut up.

“What’s all the noise about, Martin?” the Dean asked the coordinator.

“Well, we’ve got this random guy here who walked in, and he’s threatened to assault Larissa, or kiss her. And she just asked the class to vote on whether she should let him kiss her, or they should throw him out.” Larissa was pleased - he was more upset about the kissing bit, as he should be. The university rightfully took sexual harassment very seriously. But otherwise, he was right out of his depth, and clearly not that connected with the student community, or he would’ve known Julian for sure.

“Well, I’m the Dean, so I get the vote,” the dean said. “I vote for a quick kiss, and then he can sit next to me and I’ll make sure he worships her properly as he should.”

The class burst into laughter at that, and Julian walked over and kissed her passionately, and then went and sat next to the Dean.

“Martin, I’d like to introduce my husband Julian,” Larissa said to the coordinator. “He’s also Layna’s lead researcher - you heard of her?”

Ahh, the penny dropped for him. He shook his head, a wry smile on this face. “You guys are all very funny. And brave, making fun of your course coordinator like that. I’ll get you back later. Alright everyone, today is Larissa’s turn, and you better be good after that. She better be good after that!”

Larissa laughed. It wasn’t the coordinator who scored her, it was another prof ... ahh, he just walked in. Right. But it wouldn’t hurt to be nice to the coordinator anyway.

She started her presentation, describing the problem, a cross-sectional study of acute presentations of canine thyroid diseases to the vet rescue service, trying to get a sense of the cost benefit for the three different interventions that they used. She described the kind of data that she needed to answer the question - both data out of the existing records that the vet rescue service had, and then a follow up survey that she’d had to design and send out. An important part of that was ethics approvals and data access controls because this was all protected health data, even though it was pets not humans. She walked the other students through the approvals process, and then the survey she designed, along with the chatty letter that she wrote to go out with the survey request, that the service would then email out to everyone it had records for. If she got a 20% response rate, she’d get enough data. They’d cheated a bit - and she was clear about this - and linked up the service’s ongoing media work with her request for support from the pet owners to try and get the participation rate higher. Then she showed how the survey form helped answer the questions she had to answer. Finally, she walked through the data analysis she was planning to do once the data came back.

The survey hadn’t gone out - in a couple of weeks, once all the reviews - including this one - were done. But she was close!

“So this is a bit of unique opportunity for us. When is there going to be another student with such a high profile to the pet owners and right of access to the case records, and the context to process the case records and know what isn’t written down? And I’ve got lots of help on this. Martin has really done a great job helping me with the wording, and helping with all the legal compliance stuff, that’s driven me nuts. And the dean is my research lead, and he’s helped me understand the data process. At the start I was kind of afraid of everything, but now I think I see it, and I’m just at the mercy of the pet owners, will they fill out their forms? OK. Any questions?”