Student SPHere 2008-09

I realized earlier this week that I actually only have about a month of school left. I have mixed feelings about the end of this semester since it will mark the end of my studenthood in the Biostatistics program. I have learned so much in the past two years and have had so many wonderful professors, and it seems strange to be ending this chapter in my academic career. I’m really proud of the work that I’ve produced for my Plan B, and I think that I will have a really nice final product. I have really enjoyed working with my advisor throughout this whole process—I would say that getting to interact with such a brilliant and experienced individual has been the biggest benefit I have gained from the Plan B project.
My classes have really picked up in terms of work after spring break. I just finished an assignment for Clinical Trials that is due this Thursday. It was quite a bit more involved and computational than I had anticipated, so I am really glad that I decided to tackle it this weekend instead of waiting. I also spent a good portion of this weekend wrapped up in the final write-up of my plan B. I still have a few more models that I need to look at, but I have about 20 pages written and edited, so I’m feeling very good about where I am with that. I have also been working on a take home exam for my Intro to Bayes course. I’m not very confident about this take-home—it is going to require a good deal of WinBugs and R programming, and while I am certainly a huge fan of this software, I am still a novice when it comes to actual syntax. I’ve had success getting help for the homeworks from other people in the class who were more experienced programmers. I have actually been surprised by how willing people in the class have been to get together and work through problems together. It seems like a lot of the time in Biostats, people are more reluctant to work together (maybe that is just my experience). While this has been a nice unexpected feature of the class, it does me no good for the take home exam since we obviously cannot work together on the exam. I feel that as long as I take the “slow and steady” approach and don’t go ripping into the program expecting to get the entire program written bug-free in the first try I will be more than capable of doing a decent job on the exam. The professor has made the theory behind the code very clear, so conceptually I feel comfortable with the material. We’ll find out!
I am also going to be taking notes for a focus group for the Insomnia study this week. I’m not really familiar with the “qualitative data” that will apparently be collected during this focus group, but it should be interesting to find out what people found to be beneficial and detrimental to the effectiveness of the experimental intervention. Again, this study was supposed to examine the effectiveness of a mindfulness-based stress reduction course on improved sleep in insomniacs compared to using Lunesta—a standard sleep medication.
I have to say that I find it seriously disturbing that it was snowing the day of the season opener for baseball. I find it even more disturbing that people still insist that the Twins should have an outdoor stadium. Usually they justify their insane viewpoint by saying something like “baseball was meant to be played outside.” Yes, but baseball was also “meant” to be played during the day so that the players could see the ball, but we decided to alter baseball’s “natural” state by adding stadium lights, and now baseball can be played at night. This means more people can attend the game since they no longer have to occur during working hours. And yet, no one seems too concerned about this deviation from how things were “meant” to be. This is because we have things called “invention” and “progress” that alters nature for the benefit of humans. These same concepts have brought us many other unnatural yet convenient innovations such as indoor plumbing and automobiles. So now, even though people were “meant” to pee outside and walk wherever they needed to go, we realized that things don’t have to be the way they were “meant” to be. People with allergies were “meant” to suffer from sinus pressure and annoy everyone around them with their constant sniffling, but once again silly old “invention” gets in the way of how things were “meant” to be and brought us Claratin. And people were “meant” to run around naked, but (thankfully) “innovation” once again intervened with something called “J. Crew.” But God forbid we try to stay warm while watching baseball inside. Apparently that is altering the way things were “meant” to be too much.