Student SPHere 2008-09

It feels like this semester has just flown by completely—I just cannot believe that tomorrow is the last day of April. I think I started saying this about three posts ago, but now is the point in the semester when things really seem to start picking up. In a way, I’m lucky because I have only one true final exam this semester in my Clinical Trials class. However, I personally prefer exams to projects because projects are so much more time consuming than studying for an exam. This is particularly true with group projects, especially when members of your group choose to complete their work at half the speed of dead grandma. I have one such scum-sucking imbecile in one of my groups this semester. These productivity remoras seem to develop early in life. In fact, as a kid, I was usually the one stuck with all the work while everyone else sat around and ate Cheerios, and it seems not a lot has changed, except now instead of Cheerios, Mr. Group Project Member sits around playing with his palm pilot kvetching about how “busy” he is. I would like to take this opportunity to inform Mr. Group Project Member that we are all busy. In fact, I don’t know a single person enrolled in the School of Public Health either full or part time who is not busy. Most of us have more to do than there is time to do it, and yet we manage to dredge up the energy to complete our portion of the group project. Therefore, Mr. Group Project Member, would you please a) put down the damn palm pilot, b) remove your head from the bodily orifice in which it currently seems to reside, and c) complete some actual work instead of awkwardly avoiding it, so that I don’t have to sit through another group meeting thinking of all the things I could be doing instead of listening to you whine from behind your palm pilot.
Luckily, I do have two projects to complete before the end of this semester that are not group ones. The first is a presentation I have to give on cost effectiveness studies. That will be over tomorrow. The second is my plan B project, which is nearing completion. I just have a few details to add to the discussion, and then it will hopefully be in decent enough shape to send off to my panel (finger crossed). I didn’t get as much finished this weekend as I would have liked due to the fact that I was in New York for a cousin’s wedding. I was really glad to get to go to the wedding even though it wasn’t the most convenient timing on the planet. The groom was my cousin Rob, who was marrying his long-time girlfriend Sandi. It was awesome to see how happy Rob and Sandi looked the whole day. I got to see my parents and siblings as well as my amazing niece Brooke and nephew Harry. I was really glad that Dan got to come with me, and he played for the cocktail hour at the reception. We stayed one extra day so I could meet up with some friends from NYU and just be in Manhattan again. I had dinner at my favorite Ukrainian restaurant, Veselka, where they have AMAZING cabbage soup, pierogi, and beet salad. We had a great time visiting some of the old favorite spots and just walking around the Village. It was very refreshing to be back in New York, but it was REALLY hard to come back to Minnesota.
I’ve also been lining up my work plans for this summer. It is quite the mish-mosh of work: I will stay at the Department of Psychiatry until the end of August, from May until June, I will stay with the College of Pharmacy, and then at the end of June, I will start working for the Department of Pediatric Cancer in Epi. Then, this fall I will start full time as a fellow in Pediatric Cancer while I start the program for a PhD in Epidemiology. I will also be working for a private consulting firm part time this summer doing super-exciting sample size calculations and random data analyses. Hopefully, I will find some time to relax as well. I know for certain that my mom and I will be going to the Joint Statistical Meeting (the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association) in D.C. this August, and Dan is taking me to Chicago for a week as a graduation present.
But first, I just have to get through a couple more group project meetings without smashing Mr. Group Project Member’s palm pilot against his fat head…