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tarigwaemirLowell House on the Feast of St. Julian of Antioch
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fabulous_papaya has an absolutely amazing FST for Mushishi here. Download it now! I suspect I'll be playing this mix on loop for the next week.
Tin started a meme: Describe a typical day in your life in your lj.
My schedule this semester has been decidedly irregular. My usual goal is to wake up between 7 and 7:30 but on some mornings I'll wake up a bare half-hour before class, on others I won't wake up at all because I haven't gone to sleep yet. Occasionally I won't wake up until noon, a mistake that has occurred with depressing frequency this semester. Normally my morning routine takes me about an hour: wash face, brush teeth, brush hair, check weather, change clothes, check email, read LJ, update to-do list and pack books in backpack, all before heading out to the dining hall for breakfast. I move slowly in the mornings, often subject to long dazed moments over the sink or in front of the closet; it takes me a while to wake up fully although I do in fact consider myself a morning person (once I'm awake, I function much better in the mornings than I do in the evenings). But this semester, my irregular sleep cycle has forced me to wake up much more quickly. When sufficiently panicked, I can manage to get out of the room in twenty minutes.
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I eat breakfast withschwimmerin and head to class with her (physical biochemistry at 9 AM). On Tuesdays and Thursdays, if I wake up in time, it's usually not actually early enough for me to eat breakfast and go to lab, so I usually grab a muffin or donut and eat while I walk to lab, where I manage to get very little done before I have to leave for class at 10 (Systems Biology, then Molecular Ecology and Evolution). After classes on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I go back to lab for the rest of the afternoon. Mondays end with an hour of Korean class at 5. Tuesdays end with the kendo club's weekly weight-training session (on account of the tournament coming up next month). Thursdays end...whenever I finish with the lab work for the day. On Wednesdays, I have sections for all three of my science courses scattered throughout the day with only one-hour or half-hour breaks in between. The last section ends at 4 PM. Fridays are arguably the most easygoing since I have Korean from 12-3 PM, after which I go back to my dorm.
Lunch is always an issue, since I often feel too lazy to actually walk back to Lowell House (my dorm) to eat at the dining hall. So far I've subsisted by buying sandwiches at the Bauer Café, blowing my Board Plus on pizza slices from the Greenhouse, going to Fly-By or just skipping (although I've been trying not to do this last option because of kendo). Dinner on the other hand is fairly regular, and I usually eat with my roommate (andschwimmerin or ladydaera if their schedules permit). After dinner, I waste time answering emails, leaving comments, reading fic, downloading files, organizing iTunes, writing LJ posts, etc. (I usually check email and LJ pretty frequently throughout the day. If I'm in lab, I always have access to the computer, and even on a day like Wednesday, when I spend most of the time in section, I'm still more often than not in a computer classroom and hence able to do a quick check. But I don't read behind LJ cuts or leave comments or write anything but the shortest replies unless I'm back in my room.)
The rest of the evening is spent alternately wasting time and doing homework, unless it's Wednesday or Friday, in which case I have practice. Sometimes I'll take an hour-long nap before I get myself to do work. I go to sleep at varying times. I would like to say it's usually between 12-2 AM, but some nights, I'll give up on getting anything done and go to sleep at 10 or 11 PM, and other nights I'll stay up 'till 5 or 6 AM (or not go to sleep at all).
Weekends: Saturday morning is spent sleeping in until kendo. Or if I get up early enough, eating breakfast and wasting time until kendo. Then there's the invariable after-practice shower, then eating dinner at 5, before I return to wasting time while telling myself to do homework routine. This time is frequently spent napping, watching dramas or reading manga until I muster enough self-discipline to start doing homework. Sundays are more or less a continuation of the above cycle, except for Mass, which I try to attend either early in the morning at 7:30 or in the early evening at 5, depending on what time I get up.
The succinct version: when I'm not at lecture, section, lab, kendo practice or the dining hall, I am in my room procrastinating or napping until I get panicked enough to do my homework and study. That is nothing new. What is unique to this semester is that I have the most irregular sleep cycle, which may be why I'm so dazed these days. -_- The last time I slept this erratically was spring of freshman year, which also marked my lowest grade report in the history of my academic career...that does not bode well. ;_;
That reminds me, in lecture yesterday, Prof. Fontana introduced circadian rhythms as a particularly complex example of an oscillating system, and one of the points he mentioned was that circadian rhythms must be autonomous, self-sustaining loops (which apparently are known in mathematical/physical jargon as limit cycles). But in order to be self-sustaining, limit cycles have unstable phases, which are prone to drift if the cycle is not constantly synchronized with an external stimulus (like the passage of day and night). That's the reason why when people are locked up with no environmental cues, their sleep cycles will grow progressively longer and out of sync with the 24-hour period.
The day when I can actually understand the mathematics behind the above...is very far in coming.
Yesterday, I went to a career counseling workshop on applying to Ph.D. programs and finally learned what's involved in writing a statement of purpose. The way the presenter put it: "A statement of purpose is like a mini grant proposal." In other words, it has to be highly specific and detail exactly what sort of question we would want to research in grad school (hopefully tying it in with the research being done by one or more of the faculty members in the department). She also said that now is the time to think about what to write, so being the obedient future applicant, I've been thinking about it.
The thing is, I actually do have a very clear idea of the sort of problems I want to research, but I have much more trouble when asked to phrase it in terms of a model organism and a set of pathways. I started browsing (and by browsing I mean skimming the abstract) through a couple of papers cited in systems biology today, and started trying to organize my interests in more concrete terms.
Stated in as specific and narrow terms as possible, in no particular order:
Goal for this summer: read a lot of papers, pick question of interest, become expert in it. Counselor said it's unlikely that we'd actually end up researching the problem we choose to write about in the statement of purpose, but nonetheless, I should probably pick something that I really can be sufficiently passionate about. Which begs the question of whether I'm sufficiently passionate about chromatin modifications to study it for five to eight years...
Yours &c.
fabulous_papaya has an absolutely amazing FST for Mushishi here. Download it now! I suspect I'll be playing this mix on loop for the next week.Tin started a meme: Describe a typical day in your life in your lj.
My schedule this semester has been decidedly irregular. My usual goal is to wake up between 7 and 7:30 but on some mornings I'll wake up a bare half-hour before class, on others I won't wake up at all because I haven't gone to sleep yet. Occasionally I won't wake up until noon, a mistake that has occurred with depressing frequency this semester. Normally my morning routine takes me about an hour: wash face, brush teeth, brush hair, check weather, change clothes, check email, read LJ, update to-do list and pack books in backpack, all before heading out to the dining hall for breakfast. I move slowly in the mornings, often subject to long dazed moments over the sink or in front of the closet; it takes me a while to wake up fully although I do in fact consider myself a morning person (once I'm awake, I function much better in the mornings than I do in the evenings). But this semester, my irregular sleep cycle has forced me to wake up much more quickly. When sufficiently panicked, I can manage to get out of the room in twenty minutes.
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I eat breakfast with
schwimmerin and head to class with her (physical biochemistry at 9 AM). On Tuesdays and Thursdays, if I wake up in time, it's usually not actually early enough for me to eat breakfast and go to lab, so I usually grab a muffin or donut and eat while I walk to lab, where I manage to get very little done before I have to leave for class at 10 (Systems Biology, then Molecular Ecology and Evolution). After classes on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I go back to lab for the rest of the afternoon. Mondays end with an hour of Korean class at 5. Tuesdays end with the kendo club's weekly weight-training session (on account of the tournament coming up next month). Thursdays end...whenever I finish with the lab work for the day. On Wednesdays, I have sections for all three of my science courses scattered throughout the day with only one-hour or half-hour breaks in between. The last section ends at 4 PM. Fridays are arguably the most easygoing since I have Korean from 12-3 PM, after which I go back to my dorm.Lunch is always an issue, since I often feel too lazy to actually walk back to Lowell House (my dorm) to eat at the dining hall. So far I've subsisted by buying sandwiches at the Bauer Café, blowing my Board Plus on pizza slices from the Greenhouse, going to Fly-By or just skipping (although I've been trying not to do this last option because of kendo). Dinner on the other hand is fairly regular, and I usually eat with my roommate (and
schwimmerin or ladydaera if their schedules permit). After dinner, I waste time answering emails, leaving comments, reading fic, downloading files, organizing iTunes, writing LJ posts, etc. (I usually check email and LJ pretty frequently throughout the day. If I'm in lab, I always have access to the computer, and even on a day like Wednesday, when I spend most of the time in section, I'm still more often than not in a computer classroom and hence able to do a quick check. But I don't read behind LJ cuts or leave comments or write anything but the shortest replies unless I'm back in my room.)The rest of the evening is spent alternately wasting time and doing homework, unless it's Wednesday or Friday, in which case I have practice. Sometimes I'll take an hour-long nap before I get myself to do work. I go to sleep at varying times. I would like to say it's usually between 12-2 AM, but some nights, I'll give up on getting anything done and go to sleep at 10 or 11 PM, and other nights I'll stay up 'till 5 or 6 AM (or not go to sleep at all).
Weekends: Saturday morning is spent sleeping in until kendo. Or if I get up early enough, eating breakfast and wasting time until kendo. Then there's the invariable after-practice shower, then eating dinner at 5, before I return to wasting time while telling myself to do homework routine. This time is frequently spent napping, watching dramas or reading manga until I muster enough self-discipline to start doing homework. Sundays are more or less a continuation of the above cycle, except for Mass, which I try to attend either early in the morning at 7:30 or in the early evening at 5, depending on what time I get up.
The succinct version: when I'm not at lecture, section, lab, kendo practice or the dining hall, I am in my room procrastinating or napping until I get panicked enough to do my homework and study. That is nothing new. What is unique to this semester is that I have the most irregular sleep cycle, which may be why I'm so dazed these days. -_- The last time I slept this erratically was spring of freshman year, which also marked my lowest grade report in the history of my academic career...that does not bode well. ;_;
That reminds me, in lecture yesterday, Prof. Fontana introduced circadian rhythms as a particularly complex example of an oscillating system, and one of the points he mentioned was that circadian rhythms must be autonomous, self-sustaining loops (which apparently are known in mathematical/physical jargon as limit cycles). But in order to be self-sustaining, limit cycles have unstable phases, which are prone to drift if the cycle is not constantly synchronized with an external stimulus (like the passage of day and night). That's the reason why when people are locked up with no environmental cues, their sleep cycles will grow progressively longer and out of sync with the 24-hour period.
The day when I can actually understand the mathematics behind the above...is very far in coming.
Yesterday, I went to a career counseling workshop on applying to Ph.D. programs and finally learned what's involved in writing a statement of purpose. The way the presenter put it: "A statement of purpose is like a mini grant proposal." In other words, it has to be highly specific and detail exactly what sort of question we would want to research in grad school (hopefully tying it in with the research being done by one or more of the faculty members in the department). She also said that now is the time to think about what to write, so being the obedient future applicant, I've been thinking about it.
The thing is, I actually do have a very clear idea of the sort of problems I want to research, but I have much more trouble when asked to phrase it in terms of a model organism and a set of pathways. I started browsing (and by browsing I mean skimming the abstract) through a couple of papers cited in systems biology today, and started trying to organize my interests in more concrete terms.
Stated in as specific and narrow terms as possible, in no particular order:
- Regulation of genetic networks in response to environmental changes - still too vague, so I should probably figure out what sorts of networks are being researched, best organism is yeast whose genomes are relatively small and highly annotated (incidentally, my lab's main projects address this question in terms of Hsp90-mediated networks in response to light and growth conditions, cold stress, pathogens and herbivory, etc.)
- Stochastic decision-making - same genotype but different and discrete phenotypes due to stochastic processes, requires single-cell techniques like FACS and organisms tractable to such techniques such as yeast and Xenopus (schwimmerin's PI did a lot of work in this area with regard to phosphate metabolism in yeast)
- Synteny and chromosomal domains - in other words, is there organization by physical location across the genome? (the DNA looping mechanisms of insulators are suggestive...)
- Experimental evolution - studying fixation of selectively favorable mutations, also the question of selective advantage in hybrids, usually done in E. coli or yeast although I once saw a post-doc candidate's talk on research done with slime molds
- Chromatin modifications - the histone code as well as imprinting and other epigenetic mechanisms
- RNA-based silencing - also too vague, but siRNA and microRNA are both hot fields at the moment (actually RNA in general is very cool; I wouldn't mind working in a structural biology lab that studied ribozyme catalysis)
Goal for this summer: read a lot of papers, pick question of interest, become expert in it. Counselor said it's unlikely that we'd actually end up researching the problem we choose to write about in the statement of purpose, but nonetheless, I should probably pick something that I really can be sufficiently passionate about. Which begs the question of whether I'm sufficiently passionate about chromatin modifications to study it for five to eight years...
Yours &c.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 01:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 03:09 am (UTC)I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm not even ready for grad school or a career in science. What if I take my year off and never come back? :/
(Sorry for the random comment about me and not about you. But yay, I am mentioned muchly in this post. I should have gone to that seminar thing, if only I had known about it...)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:17 am (UTC)Don't get discouraged! You love biology, and you're great at it! ^_^ And no need to apologize either; it's understandable to be worried about it. Maybe you should talk to Caroline? I mean, it is after all only that one OCS person's point of view, so getting other people's advice would probably be helpful. I didn't know you hadn't heard of the workshop thing...I guess I just assumed you would, or I would have told you about it. I actually did call you just before I went to see if you were going but I think you were in class or lab or something at the time, since your phone was turned off. ;_;
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:22 am (UTC)Oh wells. I'll look at your handouts and stuff. And yes, I'm sure Caroline will be helpful (she's the one who suggested I apply and then defer a year, actually...).
I mean, I do love biology, but for the first time I'm starting to have doubts about whether or not I want to devote my entire life to it...I've never been able to pick just one thing and I'm afraid I might go insane if I don't run away and live a bohemian life researching dolphins in Australia or something -.-
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:33 am (UTC)I'll lend you the handouts tomorrow. ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:26 am (UTC)Everyone kept telling me that you should have a really specific idea of what you want to research, almost to the point of knowing what projects to propose, and I couldn't quite believe it (what are the point of rotations then?!). But this workshop put an end to my denial. ::sighs:: I mean, I always knew you should apply knowing which faculty you want to work with, but I didn't know you needed to describe it in your application. Ack, ack, ack. Must read a lot of papers this summer. T_T
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:32 am (UTC)I'll probably be postponing grad school by getting a job and working in the "real world" so I don't know what level of special hell I'm going to.
GANBATTEE!!! FAITO!~~
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:53 am (UTC)ok. /rant
Oh, and about the FST, not only am I downloading it, I am also downloading the anime. Looks really interesting, not only does it have folklore, but great art too. And no one seems to have magic mecha moon powers (Yay alliteration).
Oh, and I am obsessed with that person who wrote the soundtrack to .Hacksign. Which I still have of yours. >_> Should return that.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:56 am (UTC)Mushishi is my new favorite anime of the moment. I even wrote fic for it. Let me know if you want the manga, 'cause I have volume 1 scanslations. (The rest haven't been translated yet, I don't think.)
Much sympathies on your sense of frustration. Midterm season is HELL. FAITO to you too! ;_;v
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 05:00 am (UTC)YES. I want.
Much sympathies on your sense of frustration.
I'm contemplating homicide. I think if I ever get really really frustrated, I'll become some kind of vigilante who hunts down bad guys and sets them on fire. Like Xtreme!Batman. Well, I wish, anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 05:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 06:00 am (UTC)Hopefully I'll take a look at that over break. Probably, I'll procrastinate with it (sounds kinda dirty...) later tomorrow.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 04:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-16 05:00 am (UTC)