After one full week

You can see that my office is not quite... homey.

What a week! Grad school has already been a roller coaster of high hopes, smothered dreams, glorious successes, and dismal failures... and all four can typically occur within the span of an hour. I went whimpering to my advisor last week, fearful that I was not really cut out for the program; I returned to him this week extolling the virtues of math and statistics and my joy at being in a grad program devoted to them. My only consolation regarding my own volatile behavior is that the grad program seems to bring it out in everyone. Yay..?

I share an office with 3 grad students who are nearly done with their programs. They are not really interactive, so I have begun to work in fellow first-years' offices. We don't talk much either, but there is an aura of helpfulness, and we do stop every once in a while to ask little clarifying questions or get a hint about how someone else worked through a problem.


I find that I am a horrible lecture attender now! I don't know if it is a result of having been the lecturer for a year in China, or if it is a reflection of my belief that every moment should be dedicated to the progressive completion of my homework, but I seem constantly distracted from every lecture by the things I need to get done. I will work on that, and would appreciate tips from anyone out there who has had to force themselves to listen to people talk about things that are, for whatever reason, not immediately interesting. (And, remember, you are talking to someone who has never had recurrent trouble paying attention in class before!)

Now I am off to
1) program a heat map of some microarray data that I do not completely understand, and then finish all of the rest of the computing problems on the list I have not gotten to yet,
2) finish reading two dense sections of probability theory (Brandon ~ I can now prove to you that casinos earn, on average, $.05 per bet on red or black in roulette. I thought that may interest you, so I took notes.),
3) read several chapters of epidemiology and complete a write-up on data from an old outbreak study, and
4) read a chapter from my biostats methods text and finish the 20 associated problems.
All of this is to be done by Thursday. It seems possible. Maybe. If I suddenly begin to understand everything instantaneously and get really creative with my computer code, that is...

Anyhow, random bits of advice, rooting by email, and personalized relaxation/contemplation songs would be greatly appreciated. =)