Five signatures on a sheet of paper that says I have a doctoral degree now. :D
Yipppeee!!!
Showing posts with label Grad life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grad life. Show all posts
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Secret life of P
Ok finally I could make myself type again!
After typing 30,000+ words, I didn't think I would ever again
Yessss..I submitted my dissertation 3 days ago :)
Final defense is in two weeks and I should be dead scared right now, but I guess my brain is still numb to feel anything.
So while I'm in this numb state of mind, I think I will do the 'Secrets' tag for Poo. I am very secretive and might not be able to confess my deep dark secrets in a normal state of mind.
Ok, so I am supposed to tell 10 secrets about me. Since no one in the blog world knows me personally, pretty much anything I write will be new. But I will try to think of some "true" secrets. After all, the whole purpose of my blogging is to write down things that I can't say out loud. So here it goes:
1. People around me know that I am very close to my parents, but no one knows that how possessive I am about them. I am the only child and used to getting all their attention. So anytime my cousins or any other kid came to visit us, I used to be very, very jealous. I would pray that they leave soon and do all kind of tantrums (like faking sickness) to get attention. To be honest, I still feel little jealous when they keep talking about their 6 year old neighbor.
2. When I was 6-7 years old, I stole (as in took without asking) a Strepsils from my neighbor's desk. I thought it was a biiiig Poppins and was kind of angry at my neighbor for not sharing it with me. So I decided to help myself. If you ever had a Strepsils in your life, you probably can imagine how I was punished for my bad deed.
3. I am very adventurous with food. I can eat (may not always like it) anything that doesn't appear gross and that another human being next to me is eating. Some of the weird things I ate when none of my friends wanted to try are bheja fry (fried goat brain), frog legs and chicken gizzard. I must say they tasted pretty good :)
4. Talking of eating, one of my regular nightmares is that I have lost some of my teeth!! I have no idea why I get this nightmare all the time. Anyone knows dream analysis?
The other nightmare that I get often is being unimaginably late for something (class, train, plane, etc.). I think subconsciously I hate my habit of doing all things on the eleventh hour.
5. I don't remember any of my good dreams after I wake up, but I remember all my daydreams. As my profile says, I am a compulsive daydreamer. I think about future a lot and to the finest details. The fun part is that a lot of my daydreams have come true to the minutest details :) For example, long before I decided about my career I simply dreamt of working in US. I would imagine different professions at different times, but every time I will imagine living in an apartment in some place of US with a roommate, doing all chores myself etc. It was like deja vu when I first arrived in US and started living with my first roomie :)
6. Currently I live alone. Some of my friends think I must be very unhappy to be living by myself. But actually I love, love, love living alone. I always did. Anytime my parents went out for the day, I used to feel like the king (ok queen). The last two years have been the happiest time of my life. And to tell you a bigger secret, I am really scared to move to CA because very soon I might be living with J and won't have the whole house to myself :(
7. My friends were very surprised when they heard about J for the first time because I never showed interest in dating. They thought of me as the most unromantic person. What they don't know is I have been a hopeless romantic since ever and always believed in the 'someone somewhere' philosophy :) I just don't believe in casual dating or kissing every frog coming my way.
8. My first major crush was on a neighbor. He was the heart-throb of all girls in my school and he was quite a casanova too. To him I was just the ugly kid whom he has to (against his wishes) escort to school everyday :) Now we are friends though and he even calls himself my 'fan' on orkut.
I don't have any romantic feelings for him anymore, but I still feel happy whenever he writes to me.
9. I always loved going to school (duh..that's why I am still in school). But, I hated going to my music school. I love music and singing, but the problem was that my mom sent me to an Indian classical music class and I totally hated it. So every Sunday I will have fake stomach aches, cough and one time I even tried getting a fever by putting an onion under my arms (got the idea from some brilliant bollywood movie). Sometimes my tricks worked too! The other times, I would go to the class and lie to the teacher that we had guests at home and that is why I couldn't do my homework (i.e. practice the aa-aa-aas). I never had to lie about my school homework though :)
10. My profile says that I am ambitious. The secret here is that I have some crazy ambitions, such as being part of research projects that will take me to space or Antarctica or get me a Nobel Prize!! For now, I feel happy knowing profs who have achieved these or hold a cardboard cutout of the Nobel Prize.
Pheeww....thinking of 10 secrets is more difficult than I thought!
I think everyone I know has already done this tag. If not, please consider yourself tagged and share your deep dark secrets too. :)
After typing 30,000+ words, I didn't think I would ever again
Yessss..I submitted my dissertation 3 days ago :)
Final defense is in two weeks and I should be dead scared right now, but I guess my brain is still numb to feel anything.
So while I'm in this numb state of mind, I think I will do the 'Secrets' tag for Poo. I am very secretive and might not be able to confess my deep dark secrets in a normal state of mind
.Ok, so I am supposed to tell 10 secrets about me. Since no one in the blog world knows me personally, pretty much anything I write will be new. But I will try to think of some "true" secrets. After all, the whole purpose of my blogging is to write down things that I can't say out loud. So here it goes:
1. People around me know that I am very close to my parents, but no one knows that how possessive I am about them. I am the only child and used to getting all their attention. So anytime my cousins or any other kid came to visit us, I used to be very, very jealous. I would pray that they leave soon and do all kind of tantrums (like faking sickness) to get attention
. To be honest, I still feel little jealous when they keep talking about their 6 year old neighbor. 
2. When I was 6-7 years old, I stole (as in took without asking) a Strepsils from my neighbor's desk. I thought it was a biiiig Poppins and was kind of angry at my neighbor for not sharing it with me. So I decided to help myself. If you ever had a Strepsils in your life, you probably can imagine how I was punished for my bad deed. 3. I am very adventurous with food. I can eat (may not always like it) anything that doesn't appear gross and that another human being next to me is eating. Some of the weird things I ate when none of my friends wanted to try are bheja fry (fried goat brain), frog legs and chicken gizzard. I must say they tasted pretty good :)
4. Talking of eating, one of my regular nightmares is that I have lost some of my teeth!! I have no idea why I get this nightmare all the time. Anyone knows dream analysis?
The other nightmare that I get often is being unimaginably late for something (class, train, plane, etc.). I think subconsciously I hate my habit of doing all things on the eleventh hour.
5. I don't remember any of my good dreams after I wake up, but I remember all my daydreams. As my profile says, I am a compulsive daydreamer. I think about future a lot and to the finest details. The fun part is that a lot of my daydreams have come true to the minutest details :) For example, long before I decided about my career I simply dreamt of working in US. I would imagine different professions at different times, but every time I will imagine living in an apartment in some place of US with a roommate, doing all chores myself etc. It was like deja vu when I first arrived in US and started living with my first roomie :)
6. Currently I live alone. Some of my friends think I must be very unhappy to be living by myself. But actually I love, love, love living alone. I always did. Anytime my parents went out for the day, I used to feel like the king (ok queen). The last two years have been the happiest time of my life. And to tell you a bigger secret, I am really scared to move to CA because very soon I might be living with J and won't have the whole house to myself :(
7. My friends were very surprised when they heard about J for the first time because I never showed interest in dating. They thought of me as the most unromantic person. What they don't know is I have been a hopeless romantic since ever and always believed in the 'someone somewhere' philosophy :) I just don't believe in casual dating or kissing every frog coming my way.
8. My first major crush was on a neighbor. He was the heart-throb of all girls in my school and he was quite a casanova too. To him I was just the ugly kid whom he has to (against his wishes) escort to school everyday :) Now we are friends though and he even calls himself my 'fan' on orkut.
I don't have any romantic feelings for him anymore, but I still feel happy whenever he writes to me. 9. I always loved going to school (duh..that's why I am still in school). But, I hated going to my music school. I love music and singing, but the problem was that my mom sent me to an Indian classical music class and I totally hated it. So every Sunday I will have fake stomach aches, cough and one time I even tried getting a fever by putting an onion under my arms (got the idea from some brilliant bollywood movie
). Sometimes my tricks worked too! The other times, I would go to the class and lie to the teacher that we had guests at home and that is why I couldn't do my homework (i.e. practice the aa-aa-aas). I never had to lie about my school homework though :)
10. My profile says that I am ambitious. The secret here is that I have some crazy ambitions, such as being part of research projects that will take me to space or Antarctica or get me a Nobel Prize!! For now, I feel happy knowing profs who have achieved these or hold a cardboard cutout of the Nobel Prize. Pheeww....thinking of 10 secrets is more difficult than I thought!
I think everyone I know has already done this tag. If not, please consider yourself tagged and share your deep dark secrets too. :)
Friday, June 13, 2008
Lucky Friday the 13th
6 black blobs on a Western blot makes P the happiest girl on the planet :D
Yooohoooooo!!
Yooohoooooo!!
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Spreading the nerdism
Tagged by another geeky grad student Solitaire. This is a fun tag about books. But, unfortunately the 'fun' part goes missing from the life of grad students :(
You can skip to the red paragraph in the end if you are interested in some guessing games.
OK, so here are the rules of the game:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you.
I have two text books just next to my computer right now. I picked one and guess what, page 123 has a full page graph and and only two sentences in the caption!!
Hi hi..very tempting opportunity to stop, but I decided to try the second one.
So here are the 6th, 7th and 8th sentences on page 123 from 'Programmed Cell Death in Plants' by John Gray:
"E2F homologs of Arabidopsis build a small gene family with three members (Vandepoele et al., 2002).
Constitutive misexpression of E2Fa resulted in enlarged cotyledons due to prolonged cell proliferation (see also Figure 5.1 De Veylder et al., 2002).
The proliferation rate was dramatically increased when the E2F cofactor, DPa, was coexpressed."Sounds like a foreign language? You are not alone. Doesn't make much sense to me either :D
Ok let's make this game little interactive for my non-specialist friends.
I'm posting the cover of the book. Can anyone guess what the picture is of? (Hint: It is of course a plant part, and it is taken by a very powerful microscope that can make micro-nano millimeter sized things look life-size).
Not tagging anyone.
You can skip to the red paragraph in the end if you are interested in some guessing games.
OK, so here are the rules of the game:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you.
I have two text books just next to my computer right now. I picked one and guess what, page 123 has a full page graph and and only two sentences in the caption!!
Hi hi..very tempting opportunity to stop, but I decided to try the second one.
So here are the 6th, 7th and 8th sentences on page 123 from 'Programmed Cell Death in Plants' by John Gray:
"E2F homologs of Arabidopsis build a small gene family with three members (Vandepoele et al., 2002).Constitutive misexpression of E2Fa resulted in enlarged cotyledons due to prolonged cell proliferation (see also Figure 5.1 De Veylder et al., 2002).
The proliferation rate was dramatically increased when the E2F cofactor, DPa, was coexpressed."Sounds like a foreign language? You are not alone. Doesn't make much sense to me either :D
Ok let's make this game little interactive for my non-specialist friends.
I'm posting the cover of the book. Can anyone guess what the picture is of? (Hint: It is of course a plant part, and it is taken by a very powerful microscope that can make micro-nano millimeter sized things look life-size).
Not tagging anyone.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Calvin knows best
Time to get back to 'inflating weak ideas, obscuring poor reasoning and inhibiting clarity'. Sigh!
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
I feel rewarded
Two of my students from Spring semester found me on Facebook.
One of them said he misses my class every Tuesday! He also said that he enjoyed learning the things I taught in the second half of the semester and regrets that he didn't take serious interest from the beginning of the semester.
I feel I have achieved one of my teaching missions today: making a student (that too a non-major student) interested in learning the subject.
They usually are only interested in completing the course as a degree requirement. Some of them are also interested in the grades sometimes :)
One of them said he misses my class every Tuesday! He also said that he enjoyed learning the things I taught in the second half of the semester and regrets that he didn't take serious interest from the beginning of the semester.
I feel I have achieved one of my teaching missions today: making a student (that too a non-major student) interested in learning the subject.
They usually are only interested in completing the course as a degree requirement. Some of them are also interested in the grades sometimes :)
Friday, May 2, 2008
"What you don't have you don't need it now"
I wish I could be that optimistic, but I am totally unable to make myself feel so today.
I desperately need two things that I don't have now: a successful experiment and a job offer.
When will that beautiful day come?
I desperately need two things that I don't have now: a successful experiment and a job offer.
When will that beautiful day come?
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Mixed emotions
Got my first postdoc interview call letter last night. Feeling happy, excited, nervous and terrified all at the same time. The battle begins now...
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Great minds think alike
P: I have no idea what I am doing with this experiment * 
*
Albert Einstein: If I knew what I was doing, it wouldn't be called research.
*Albert Einstein: If I knew what I was doing, it wouldn't be called research.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Ph.D. blues
- I have to finish my dissertation in 3 months.
- This paper needs to get accepted immediately.
- I still have to do that one experiment.
- I have to have a job offer soon.
- Those lab reports need to be graded by Tuesday.
- I need to file my tax returns.
- My house looks like a pigsty and needs mega cleaning.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
I am becoming a skeptic
A student calls me up and tells me that he is in serious family crisis. The situation he describes is really, really awful.
I feel really bad and I ask "What do you want to do?"
He says "Can I submit that paper two days later?"
So now I am thinking " The family crisis he just described sounds too horrible to not run home immediately. Is he telling the truth or is he making up stories just to get that extension?"
I am turning into a mean, skeptic!
I blame it on the past experiences. People come up with some pretty crazy excuses around this time of the semester. It's mid-term week. Everyone is crushed with deadlines and exams. I have been getting deadline extension requests for this paper since last two days (It is due tonight). Unfortunately, I do not have the authority to do so and the Professor who has, won't buzz. I guess it's because he has even more experience than us TAs. "Tough love", he says!
I feel really bad and I ask "What do you want to do?"
He says "Can I submit that paper two days later?"
So now I am thinking " The family crisis he just described sounds too horrible to not run home immediately. Is he telling the truth or is he making up stories just to get that extension?"
I am turning into a mean, skeptic!
I blame it on the past experiences. People come up with some pretty crazy excuses around this time of the semester. It's mid-term week. Everyone is crushed with deadlines and exams. I have been getting deadline extension requests for this paper since last two days (It is due tonight). Unfortunately, I do not have the authority to do so and the Professor who has, won't buzz. I guess it's because he has even more experience than us TAs. "Tough love", he says!
Friday, February 8, 2008
An eventful week
After my last guilty post, I worked a lot but sadly, after doing a loooong and hectic experiment, I was rewarded with a very unexpected result :( First I freaked-out, then started having doubts about how I will finish my dissertation by summer if things go wrong like this. This thought led to fitful sleeping with nightmares, whining and scaring parents, boyfriend and best friend..scared adviser and lab-mate too to some extent (to the outer world I usually pretend to be a completely unbreakable person :P ). But then after some major reading and brainstorming...eureka!! I found an explanation to the weird result..it might not be weird actually..everything in science has a reason :) Now I have to run one more test this week to get a nice result avoiding the unwanted part. Please, please, please let next week be a positively productive week!!!!!!
Saturday, February 2, 2008
This is me!!!!
It's 5.10 p.m. and I have not done anything productive all day (my day started at 11 a.m. as today is Saturday)! I am supposed to study and finalize a protocol for a new experiment that I have to start next week. I also need to cook and clean today. I better get going...
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