sifting through fluff & rubble

the extreme heat wave finally broke! you know how when you're baking something, and you open the oven to look in, you get blasted by heat in your face? that's how it felt all this week when i opened the door to leave my air-conditioned house. speaking of extremes, this will sound crazy coming from a pretty un-superstitious person: you know how this year has seen what seems like a lot of natural disasters? let's see...the myanmar cyclone, the china earthquake, an earthquake in iceland, a greek earthquake, tornadoes and flooding in the u.s....(what am i forgetting? the tomato-linked salmonella outbreak?). well, i recall reading back at chinese new year, that the predictions for the "year of the rat" included worldwide turbulence, natural disasters, epidemics, food poisoning and other extremes. it�s certainly a coincidence. make what you will of it�.

i'm thrilled that it's summer, which has so far been good but BUSY. i'm feeling pressure to develop my line of research and get on the road to writing some serious scholarly research articles. i�ve said it before and will say it again (and probably again & again later on): i�m seriously under the gun to start churning out publications for two big reasons: 1) the # of articles i publish as primary author will affect my job prospects after graduation; 2) my professor is steering me towards writing a new trend, called the �manuscript style� dissertation, which basically means i have to produce 3 or 4 published (or publishable) articles on the same topic. they must hang together coherently to form my distinct "line" (specialty area) of research, and hence, my dissertation's backbone.

the manuscript dissertation is generally considered a more rigorous option. in the past, (especially in the humanities and social sciences), people have gotten away with writing fluff and then calling it their "dissertation". so it�s fine with me if the research world holds more respect for the newer, less air-filled manuscript-styled dissertation. but �increased rigor� also translates into: �likely to entail the use of more difficult statistical methods than a �traditional" social-science dissertation". this admittedly scares me a little (even though i�ve completed FOUR of five stats classes, and gotten A�s in them, which is WAY more math than i ever planned or imagined when i started school two years ago). it�s one thing to do well in class, it�s another beast to apply those mathematical models and lucidly bandy around technical terms like �variance�, "factor loadings" and �collinearity� in a paper or conference presentation. if you thought the fields of educational research or psychology were "soft", think again.

in other news, i�m also working on a couple of paid data analysis (and podcasting!) projects at the medical school for my summer assistantship. i started yesterday, and am excited about this opportunity. very few people know about the applications of educational psychology in medical education, or that there is even a need for us within that field! so it�s sort of a �best-kept secret niche�. the only downside is that parking at the hospital will be a bitch, even with my DMV-issued placard. you see, yesterday, when i got there to report to work, i discovered that one of the two parking garages was�.gone! demolished! a pile of rubble! but wonderful things can arise from rubble: they tore down the old parking deck to break ground for the Emily Couric Cancer Center. (Katie Couric was in town this spring for the ground-breaking ceremony in honor of her late sister). it�ll be great to have a state-of-the-art, cutting-edge cancer treatment center. i just hope there�s a place for the cancer patients to actually park. ;-)

last but not least, remember how, right before Thanksgiving, i ended up in the ER with an enormous and outrageously painful ruptured ovarian cyst? and remember how it blind-sided me b/c i�m on the Pill and am therefore not supposed to ovulate and get cysts in the 1st place? well, monday was my 2nd follow-up ultrasound. apparently, i really am one of the minority of women who continuously ovulate on birth control pills, which is rather unsettling.

*PS, question of the day: to go or not to go to an 80's party tonight that i got an invite to? it'd help if i actually had some 80's clothing (ick!), but i don't, which is a good thing.