Student SPHere 2008-09

Usually, I don't much care for holidays, particularly ones designed to enrich the cards/flowers/candy/schmaltzy junk industries. However, I very much enjoyed a surprise indoor picnic with my sweetie yesterday. A picnic in February in Minnesota-- who knew? He spread out on a quilt in the living room and assembled a delicious noshing assortment from the Wedge. Ahhh, delicious and relaxing.

Given the relatively easier schedule this semester, I've been able to have more fun than usual. On Tuesday, we gathered a team for Science Trivia at the Nomad. Unfortunately, the usual host, the inimitable Dessa of Doomtree, was ill and couldn't attend. I'm going to blame that fact for our lackluster performance-- come on, 5th place? Of course, no matter the score, science trivia is a great time. It's much more fun for nerds like us than usual pub trivia.

Friday night we hit another great venue, Jitters, for a fellow SPHer's birthday (shout out to Ania!). I was a little cranky from working all day, but man, my mood turned completely around when the fabulous Erin Schwab took the stage. She was belting out great sing-along music, telling stories, and generally putting the packed house into a rollicking mood.

Classes are moving at a great pace. Spatial is taking a little longer to get up to speed, since we have made some detours to explain basic hierarchical Bayesian modeling and learn some R. Bayes, in contrast, is cranking along. Though I've seen many of the problems before, Cavan is putting in plenty of additional exercises to keep me challenged. The weekly assignments require a lot of work, but I am grateful for the practice of doing prelim-level problems.

The work on skin cancer with Bruce is moving ever closer to a second manuscript. We've done some very basic modeling thus far, but I'm starting to see glimmers of much more interesting problems in these data. The ionizing radiation exposure profiles of the cohort members are very complex and interesting. So far, simple averaged or cumulative values sufficed, but I am intrigued at the possibilities for more nuanced descriptions of exposure history.

Brad just landed a new project as well that may form the basis of a PhD project in the future. The data come from a clinical trial, but this is secondary analysis. The investigators want to jointly model short-term patient-reported outcomes (quality of life) and longer-term clinically relevant survival outcomes. The literature has several examples of models that use latent variables to link two outcomes that are correlated and share predictors. The challenge is to do this using time-dependent variables and account for censoring and correlation. At this point, I'm getting acquainted with the existing literature, which is an exciting phase.

My final block of school time is devoted to office hours, which have been great. It's so gratifying to be able to help students. I get to feel smart, they feel relieved-- everyone wins.

Have a Happy President's Day!