Student SPHere 2008-09

Well, I am feeling rested and energized now! We spent a week visiting my family in Kansas City, MO for the holidays. The biggest event by far was my sister having her first baby, my beautiful niece Nithya.

It was such a powerful experience coming together as a family to welcome our newest member. Everyone was excited about the baby, passing her around like an adorable little hot potato all week. I am so proud of my sister and her partner for their teamwork as new parents-- I think they'll be great!

I also spent a day in Lawrence, KS with my other sister, visiting the campus where she is a graduate student in Communication Studies. Her office is so nice compared to mine, I can't say I wasn't a bit jealous.

It was striking how different the academics, assistantships, and culture are in her department versus Biostats. I swore up and down that she wouldn't really be teaching, but lo and behold, she was the sole instructor for two sections of an intro speech class. This is far more intense than any teaching assignments I've heard of at U of M.

And she's friends with everyone! There's precious little socializing among Biostats students, particularly outside of school, but her whole incoming cohort (masters and PhD together) seems to be one big happy family. Also a little jealous of that, to be honest. Watching my little sisters grow up into moms and grad students is crazy, I tell ya.

Another bright spot of the trip was receiving my grades. Despite an unusually challenging semester, all my years of schooling experience paid off again. This is definitely encouraging me for next semester, when I am scaling back to only two classes, but both of them doozies.

With a whole week and a couple of weather-related schedule changes, I even managed to get some work done on the Carlin and Louis solutions manual while at home. We're planning to have it done for spring semester textbook adoptions, so I need to get the last few problems worked out before the new semester. It's a little frustrating to be this close to finished and still struggling with odds and ends, but I know I'll be excited to see it done.

And finally, a little plug for some computer nerdery. My dad helped me update my installation of the open-source operating system Ubuntu, which is a flavor of Linux. I only run one program that requires Windows (WinBUGS; though there is a LinBUGS for Linux, it doesn't seem to be very dependable yet), so I still dual boot. Eventually, I would like to free myself entirely from the evil Microsoft empire. So far, R, LaTeX, Firefox, and Picasa-- all the things I use most frequently-- are working beautifully.

For people not acquainted with the open-source movement, in short, the benefits are free software, better security, and a poke in the eye to "the man." Particularly as an academic, I love the freedom, openness, and spirit of innovation that go with open source.

Have a safe and happy new year!