Student SPHere 2008-09

My mother and step-father flew in from Pennsylvania for the weekend, and I was able to spend a good deal of time catching up with them and showing them a little bit of the flavor of the Twin Cities (cheese curd). We enjoyed a good deal of the fall foliage and the very un-Minnesotan nice weather that graced most of the weekend. Saturday, we had a mock-Thanksgiving since we won’t be together for the actual holiday. They are both professors at Allegheny College in Meadville, and get a tiny Thanksgiving holiday (as does the University of Minnesota as far as I’m concerned), so unfortunately my husband and I will be dining a deux come Thanksgiving. For the meal, I prepared fresh pumpkin soup with cinnamon crèma, a red cabbage and jicama slaw with lime dressing, sweet potato tamales with orange pecan butter, chayote succotash, and a spiced-rubbed pork tenderloin and sun-dried cranberry roulade. For dessert, we had mini pumpkin and pecan pies. It was nice to be able to sit and relax with family and catch up. My mom has always been a big inspiration to me when it comes to the pursuit of career and education, and I have always looked at her position in academia as somewhat of a goal for myself someday. I love that she is able to continue to learn and constantly apply what she learns by conducting research, but also as a professor, pass on her knowledge to those who will be continuing that research in the future. It also helps that she’s a total math geek like me.
For Sunday we attended the Lions/ Vikings game, which could quite possibly have been the most stressful game I have ever witnessed. It does not seem possible that either team could have tried harder to lose. The only bright spot (besides the fantastic Bernard Berrien touchdown) was the fact that my personal favorite Viking—Kevin Williams—had four sacks. Sitting in the Metrodome, though, I did realize that the Minnesota winters have clearly scrambled the brains of whoever decided to make TCF stadium and the new Twins stadium outdoors. I don’t care if you think the sport was “meant to be played� outside—if I wanted to freeze my butt off for hours and hours while being surrounded by obnoxious, smelly men guzzling overpriced beer, I’d take up ice fishing. I also don’t think that we should have outdoor stadium for the sake of “tradition.� You know, the Aztecs had a tradition that was thousands of years old—ritual human sacrifice—and despite the fact that it was a tradition, it was still a bad idea.
Today I had to take my first stat theory exam. It was stressful, but having had a wonderful weekend with my parents and husband helped me to stay relaxed and focused. I, of course, wore my lucky math shirt. A good friend from high school made me a t-shirt for my 18th birthday that says “I’m statistically significant.� I have worn this shirt to every important exam I have taken since that date, and it has hence become my lucky math shirt. And no, I don’t wash it, and yes, that is disgusting.
I finished entering all of the data for the first wave of our insomnia study. We’ve also collected all of the baseline data for our second wave, so that got entered as well. I got to do a test run on some of the reports I created in Access, and they are all running smoothly, which makes me very happy. Since this is a pilot study, a big concern of the PI is why people got excluded at different stages of the study so that areas of concern such as overly rigorous exclusion criteria can be addressed before a larger study would be conducted, so we’ve been analyzing that information in order to prepare another grant proposal. The main outcomes paper for the transplant study is coming along. Dr. Thomas in the Biostats department has been super helpful with those analyses; he also showed me how to make interaction plots in R.
I’ve really come to like R, and I think that I should definitely take the time to learn it. I have done the online tutorial, but I still really know nothing about it. That is one thing that I wish the University would offer; courses on how to use the different statistical packages. I have taken an e-learning course on SAS, and that has been really helpful, and I have found some online tutorial for SSPS and SAS and M-plus on the UCLA website, and I just wish something like that existed here for us to use. Even a little summer class or something. I’d take it anyways.