The Laursonian Institute

I would be remiss if I didn’t post soon again after that last dismal entry.

Things are looking up, or at least, aren’t looking as down as they were.   Data analysis is clipping along at the lab, and my advisor is excited about our project.  It’s been a while since we were working on my data and making any headway, so it was nice to reconvene and see our good work.  It always gets my advisor fired up, and that gets me encouraged.

I also had a semi-candid conversation with aforementioned advisor about how behind I was feeling on my work and how much there seems to be to do this upcoming year.  I’m certainly behind where I need to be, so I don’t think I’ll be quite on track, but it sounds like it’s not a disaster.  He is completely nonplussed and said that the metrics they’re giving us to follow were mostly to ‘weed out the chaff’.  So if I’m still excited about my work, and it’s going well, but late… well, I guess it’ll be okay.  The only really positive take-home message I got from the whole conversation was that my advisor made this little smirking face to himself while I was explaining why I thought I wasn’t doing a good job.  It was a face that said I’m a naive graduate student who is needlessly worried and doing a good job. Like he remembered being this pent up about deadlines and those days are far behind him (and lo, they are quite far behind him…) and some day I’ll learn that doing good work speaks for itself.  It’s not really enough to sustain me through dark days, but it’s better than nothing.  I can at least be confident that while on paper my deadlines look firm and the repercussions for dallying feel dire, my advisor could care less and thinks I’m on track.

In related good news, the project really is going well.  I’ve hired Lewis to help me build a model for data analysis, and we’re getting help from a variety of fronts.  My advisor is an excellent networker, and he has been talking up my project to a rather famous psycholinguist who has been looking into similar questions with similar methods for analysis and has just published a paper much more like mine than any other I’ve seen so far.  He was kind enough to basically loan us the postdoc who built his model, and that postdoc is willing to either mod their model for us, or give us their model to mess with as we see fit.  It effectively adds an author to the paper I should be able to publish out of this, and it’s a massive help for our burgeoning pattern classification program too.  I’ve also gotten my hands on the book that fully describes the other stats model we’re using, which means I can finally try and understand the transforms we’re doing on our data to get the groupwise stats. Even better, those alternate groupwise stats are nearly done, and in doing so we may have finally figured out how to batch script the program I have to use, which means the next few rounds of manipulations should go much more quickly. So… things grind forward.  Slowly, but with distinct momentum.

All is not lost.

August 11th, 2010 | Tags: advisor, model, QP, research | Category: school | Comments Off

Every day is a new record low.

Being depressed about your work in grad school is a different kind of depressed.  I’ve been through my share of low spells – been on prozac and the whole nine yards – but this is different, though I think in a good way.  When I was a teenager, depression could eat my whole life.  I didn’t have anything to do, no responsibilities to live up to, and depression could occupy entire days or weeks uninterrupted.  Now, my life is so busy I don’t have time to sputter that long.  I can only acknowledge it, come up with some way to cope, and move on.  I guess blogging today is one of those ways of coping.

The heart of the matter is that I’m not entirely sure I can do it – that I’ve found the place where my willingness to do something is outstripped by the demands of the task.  Lewis and I often discuss what makes grad school so damned hard, and I always come back to stamina.  The pace of life is so unnatural, so unlike any other environment I’ve been in.  There are whole months of non-communication, weeks and weeks spent working for a boss who doesn’t exist, on a project of your own invention which will either be approved or not, and which will not be acknowledged by any but a handful of professors who mostly forget that you depend on their graces and would appreciate expediency and thoroughness.  I feel like I’m traveling to the moon and NASA forgot they sent me up.  The only payout is being safely ensconced back where I started, and a souvenir rock I can feel the pride in knowing I picked up myself.  This must be enough to sustain, and it is, in the big-picture view.  It’s the thousands of minute microsteps between here and there that sap the life from you.  Every time I set another foot down, the ground is so unsteady… and I’m getting so tired.  How do you keep going on?

In some ways, I want to spit out a bunch of facts about how hard I’ve been working and why I deserve to be this exhausted.  There are no numbers, though, and an enumeration of this type always comes off as some kind of challenge.  I’m not suggesting I’m working any harder than any other graduate student – or anyone else, for that matter.  All I know is that I’m working harder than I seem to be capable of sustaining.  I’m at the point where I’m banking on the idea I’ll burst into flame and be reborn of my ashes – suddenly a competent and knowledgeable neuroscientist.   You know, with a degree and everything.

At times I find the very act of living difficult.  It’s hard to keep forward momentum going.  Particularly things that should are basic, unavoidable necessities like cleaning, buying groceries, walking the dog, showing up at work…  the very act of going outside is hard.  It puts me in range of personal interaction, which is challenging when my brain is sucked in on itself.  Having appropriate conversation seems unlikely, so I’d rather remain inside, with my own self, which I can at least depend on me not to surprise me.  I have this same problem when things are going particularly well, too – my brain gums up and the more distant you are from my work the more difficult it is to find the right mind-space to have an appropriate conversation.  Lewis – easy.  Lab mates – decent.  Colleagues, cohort – getting more difficult.  Everyone else?  Seemingly lost.  I guess that’s an unintended apology to everyone who thinks I’m turning into an ass.  My brain stopped working a couple years ago and I’ve forgotten how to be a real person.

And somehow, I’ve only begun.  I’m attempting to write the first paper — just the first paper! — in a very long-haul program.  If I can’t knock a 40-pager out over the summer, how am I ever going to tackle the thesis?  I feel compelled to add that I’m already behind schedule.  This paper was supposed to have been done before summer started.  The second paper – the one that qualifies me to write my thesis – is already coming up due this Spring.  I try as much as I can not to think about that particular problem, but it looms.

I suppose at this point I’m obliged to get myself back to work.  If I’m going to waste every weekend indoors, I might as well try and accomplish something tangible in that time.

August 8th, 2010 | Tags: QP, suck, thesis | Category: school | Comments Off

This mental space is comforting, maddening, disturbing.   An item attempting to leave orbit with no way to judge the amount of fuel it takes to leave orbit, I’m seizing anything flammable and throwing it on the pyre.  I can only pray my resources and stamina can outstrip physics, and only then will I know whether my craft can even survive the atmospheric pressure.

The future is so tangible I can feel its inevitability and irrealis in even my most mundane actions.  My advisor has been slice time corrected and smoothed and sits before me the concatenation of every time sample simultaneously existing in the moment and serving as the culmination of decades of his actions.  His purpose is realized in the fomenting of my labyrinthal crusades, and it could not have been otherwise that he exists in this moment to give me sphinx-like hints to this quixotic riddle.

My erstwhile mind fixates on my own past, my foibles, my inconsistencies, my unworthiness.  I’ve been mentally tidying, mending this dusty web of acquaintance.  Apologizing for pains I’ve caused is ultimately futile, but somehow any end is better than a loose one.   I move from situation to situation, compulsively regurgitating agonies I’d swallowed in vain hope to rid myself of them.  My social failures dog me, but hopes of reconciliation and restitution have been long vanquished.  Failing toward forgiveness I find only my prostrate shame discarded, the detritus of accumulated actions and reactions no longer relevant to the narrative.

I rouse myself from these seemingly precambrian delusions only to discover I’m entrenched in the same mundane reality I ever have been.  Reading accumulates, papers get procrastinated, I impress, aggravate, avoid the same people in the same places, and I remember to walk the dog.  The inconceivably numerous voxels of reality concatenate together to form an interminable rope from past to future I am bound to follow.  Free will somehow remains: enduring, wieldable, oppressive.

April 22nd, 2010 | Tags: advisor, failure, fate, friends, future, metaphor, past, pressure | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Today was the first day of Spring Quarter classes for me.  It went really well.  I’ve only got two classes this quarter, and they’re both things I’m sort of inherently interested in and professors I like.  Today was Historical Linguistics (i.e. language evolution) and it’s taught by a professor I’ve not had before, but who I rather enjoy.  I’ve been working with him a little on a creolization project, for which Lewis and I recorded stimuli a while back, and he’s someone I get along with very well.  He called me a ‘kindred spirit’ in class today, and we had some hearty conversation after class about some of the applications of theoretical phonology in the functionalist / non-formalist domains.  I really feel like he may be the last missing piece of the advisor Frankenstein I’ve been trying to build.  He’s not into neuroscience, but he’s very interested in the applications of cognitive science to phonology, as I am, and that puts him more squarely in my camp than most neuroscientists anyway.  His class is being run in a discussion-oriented manner, and I did a surprisingly large amount of talking today for a first class sort of day.  It’s nice to have a professor teach to you sometimes, which he tends to do since I’m really the only phonologist in the class, and I’m feeling quite up on the theory points we were debating today.  Anyway, it should be a good class and I think I may ask him to be on my committee before too long.

Other than that, I’m feeling generally really on top of things here.  I’m surprisingly confident about my project and my ability to do it and write a good paper from it.  I did my first fMRI scanner operating this past weekend and it’s certainly not hard.  After so much practice in the operator training, it doesn’t feel strange to stick people in the machine, and running the controls is quite straight-forward.  I thought it might be more scary than it really was, but it’s all so automated and the magnetic field is so basically harmless I don’t feel like I can do that much wrong.  I’ll be doing my next session this weekend, and I have the first date to try my own study booked already.  It’s coming up really soon, but I’m so excited to get it off the ground and get my first subjects in the scanner, I really can’t wait.  I keep telling myself that doing it at all is a laudable achievement in my own eyes – I’ve been wanting to do an fMRI study since I learned it was possible in my first lingusitics class.  I’m so excited that it’s finally going to happen, even if I don’t want to stick with cognitive neurolinguistics after this, I’ll be glad I had the chance to try it.

So it’s going to be a good quarter.  I’m being paid to do my own research this quarter in stead of TAing, and I’m taking a few units with my advisor for that same purpose.  I can’t help but finish getting my data together this quarter.  If only the analysis goes smoothly, I may well have this QP out on time!

March 30th, 2010 | Tags: classes, ERW, research, scanner, study | Category: school | Comments Off

Namely, me.

It’s been a rather busy quarter so far, but we’ve just now reached the midway point.  I’ve had some kind of massively successful day.  These are my favorite sort – the kind where you wake up thinking to yourself that it’s going to be a rough day, and then you just nail everything as the day goes.  Perfect performance in all realms.  I feel like I’m being an accommodating, thorough individual and life is repaying me by letting me make a good impression on people and do a decent job at the things I care about.

I recorded stimuli for a creolization project this morning.  It was a little like an IPA pop quiz, and I was doing it as a favor for a buddy of mine and a professor whose class I’m taking next quarter.  Wanted to do a good job, and it seems as though it went just fine.  Recorded each set 10 times, and wasn’t asked to redo anything.  Only little mishap was that my head is producing some ridiculous clicking noise, which sometimes happens to me.  I think it might be when I’m getting sick or something, my nasal cavity increases in pressure when I’ve closed my velum and it makes my ears pop.  I had noticed this a while ago and thought it was just something I could only hear in my own skull, but apparently it’s loud enough to get picked up on the microphone and disturb my recording a little.  I think they can edit it out, but it’s a little embarrassing to have a head which pops and cracks of its own volition!

After that I headed to the lab to meet with my advisor for the first time in two weeks.  We had a really good meeting, very relaxed and pleasant, and on top of that, also productive.  He seemed impressed with the work I had been doing while he was out of town, and I’ve gotten the go-ahead on the design I came up with in his absence.  Furthermore, he’s been talking about me to more famous psycholinguist types, and had a discussion about phonemic adaptation with Greg Hickok!  Apparently Hickok has been working on a phonological adaptation experiment as well, but with whole phonemes instead of features.  I’m not sure what the status of his project is now since researchers are generally pretty close-lipped about work before it gets published, but it sounds like he did find some effects which is incredibly encouraging for our study!  I think it also made my advisor happy to see that famousy psycholinguist types are also doing work in our area and, to quote him, “the field is still wide open”.   Anyway, we tooled around with our experiment design and landed on a scheme we like, so I’m at the point where I’m ready to record some stimulus and start putting things together to prepare for our first pilot runs in the MRI.   Whoohoo!

In a related note, I also ran in to my advisor’s wife (who also works at the center) and she had some very nice things to say about me.  I’ve never really met her before, but she stopped in an office I was in to see who I was and tell me that she edited the letter of rec that my advisor wrote for me and was very impressed with me.  She was being a little jokey about it, but it’s nice to hear someone say, even jocularly, that I’m an impressive person and that she was hoping they’d be able to keep me around in the lab because what I do is very cool.  If that’s the content of my advisor’s letter of rec, I feel like I’m in rather good hands.   It’s the back-door equivalent of having someone stop you and tell you that your advisor has been talking about how great you are.  Many yays for that!

Speaking of people speaking well of me, I also got into a little snafu over my assignments next quarter.  Apparently I had been assigned to be a reader for the historical linguistics class that Lewis’ advisor is teaching, and that he had specifically requested me.  Unfortunately, my advisor was also hoping to give me a graduate student research position in the lab (ie, no TAing-type work, only research work you actually get paid for, as opposed to all the research I’m doing anyway but not getting paid for).  I hadn’t meant for this to be a surprise for the department, since I presumed it was being communicated to people that this spring was my ‘free’ quarter, which the fellowship I won last year allowed me to have.  Turns out, there is no ‘free’ quarter since they can’t afford my fees if I don’t work and they had given my a job without telling me.  Needless to say, my department chair wasn’t really happy to hear I thought I was going to be a researcher not a reader, and it was a bit of a debacle.  At any rate, he called my advisor while we were meeting and last I heard was he had backed down from saying I needed to do this readership and told me advisor ‘we should do whatever is best for Laurie’.  That’s a very good place to be, even if it’s causing the department some strife.  I’m not sure what the final outcome is going to be, but it sounds like one way or the other, I’ll get that research position, even if I have to do both jobs.  Which would, on the bright side, be a decent amount of money!

Last, and I suppose least, I think we also finally picked a project for our phonetics paper, and it’s something I’m actually surprisingly interested in.  It’s going to be a very short paper which is only an experimental design, and I’m coauthoring it with two of my best friends in my cohort.  Yes, that does compute to something like 1.5 pages each.  I’m really looking forward to that, especially given the frustrating next week I’m potentially having in my psychology class.  I got my presentation moved up a week by surprise, and I’ve got a rough draft of that paper due the same day.  I’ll get it done.  I’m feeling so on top of the world right now.

February 9th, 2010 | Tags: advisor, compliments, lab, linguists, phonetics, project, QP, recording, stimuli | Category: school | Comments Off

Epic meeting with my advisor today.  He set up a regular weekly meeting with all his grad students, and I’m the lucky kid with the first meeting slot.  I thought this might make him less strung out than getting him later in line, but no.  As I should have expected, he had already bumped the meeting after me, and I was bookended by non-regular meetings which appeared to be a bit intense.  I do feel bad for the guy, but I guess when you’re hard to get a hold of, or are prone to forgetting required things, angry meetings do tend to crop up when you can be found.

Anyway, I did get my full hour meeting, and we talked over my research proposal.  Last night I dreamed that he was really disappointed with it and found it unprofessional and not the quality of work one would expect from a graduate student.  Today didn’t go as poorly as all that, though he wasn’t real excited about it either.  I think that’s his professional face, and I took it pretty well.  He made some changes to it that I am thankful for, like shortening the overall length and breadth of the experiment, and we hacked off even a good portion of the critical stuff.  So it will be a small, pilot-y type study, but it will give me the opportunity to do something quickly, without staking too much of my life on it.  And in the end, he thinks that we’ll still get a paper out of it, so what more could I want?  I get my free fMRI experience, and hopefully a publication.

The more interesting part of our meeting was the non-QP stuff.  Turns out all the leading questions he was asking me about the decisions I made in my proposal was so he could feel me out for a different plan.  He’s cooking up some sort of holy trinity of researchers and wants me to be the dedicated monkey/grad student for the project.  It’s entirely nebulous as of yet, but it involves liasioning with all three of the language researchers at the CMB and doing something that combines my strengths – sublexical phonology – with theirs (sign, music, fMRI).  It’s a huge undertaking, a thesis-level project for sure, and definitely more like the primordial soup which precedes creation than a tangible and easily managed plan. On the other hand, what better beginnings are there for ones PhD topic than your advisor waxing poetic about the clouds you could reach for and asking you if you would be the monkey/Moses to make something out of it.

To pat my own back here, I feel I must mention that he described me as someone comfortable working in a broad network of seemingly unrelated things and that I was able to think creatively and outside-the-box about things, and this is why he thought I would be the person to lead this effort.  It’s not at the zenith of complements, but coming from my awkward advisor, it was really nice to hear he thought well of me and had been thinking about my future.  Next up is a meeting with these three brains, and it’s going to be quite a trick to keep myself grounded in the fact that I know some things these researchers don’t, and have (am) the manpower they need, without feeling like I’m an inferior member of the group because they’re all brilliant tenured lab managers, and I’m just a dopey grad student unfamiliar with their work.

All-in-all, a very successful but grounded day for me.  And productive to boot!

January 12th, 2010 | Tags: future, lab, QP, research, thesis | Category: school | Comments Off

The quarter is starting to get to its feet over here.  I’ve had all my classes save one, my neurolinguistics seminar, which I’m rather looking forward to tomorrow.  Monday was a bit more harried than I anticipated, as the professor I’m TAing for wanted us to hold section.  This is rather unorthodox for the first week, let alone the first day!  On the bright side, he also is in the habit of preparing exercises in advance, so there was not much work to be done in that short preparation period.  Section is required for this class, and as such it was completely packed this week – not a single spare seat in the house.  Teaching in cramped conditions is a little difficult because the room gets hot, and the kids are a little less apt to volunteer in a large class.  Last quarter I averaged something like 10-15 students in my non-required sections, and yesterday I had about 30.  It’s slightly ridiculous, and I think slightly unnecessary to have required section attendance, but on the other hand, this class is also going to be a fair bit more difficult. Other than a bunch of TA stuff, I only have Quechua on Mondays, so it works out nicely to have several low-stress hours of class attendance and then just one hour of teaching.  Very nice indeed.

Today all I had was Phonetics, which I fear is going to be equal parts trying and inspiring.  It’s taught by the professor I TAed for last quarter, who is the most laissez-faire professor I’ve seen.  We have no syllabus, no book, no readings, no homework, and no real expectations for our term paper.  This is nice, but it also means he teaches the class with the expectation that none of us are really learning anything, or even want to be there.  He told us this morning that he expected us to attend class “at least 51% of the time”, which I know is a joke, but sets an odd tone for a graduate seminar.  Graduate students don’t skip class – we’re putting a lot of our lives into being here, and we tend to be rigorous and reliable students.  We wouldn’t have been admitted if we weren’t!  For all that, it’s still going to be an interesting class.  We’re doing acoustic phonetics exclusively, and it’s a subject that’s one of my secret loves.  I feel some days like I could have been a phoneticist in another life, if acoustic phonetics had been taken seriously by our Generative-minded undergraduate department.  As it’s not really part of the Generative research paradigm, it wasn’t actually taught at USC.  What little of it I’ve done (which is more than most, admittedly) was from my very favorite professor, an adjunct who USC didn’t hire and who was teaching Intro Phonology, though he was in fact a phonetician.  I got a big kick out of reading spectrograms, and he inspired me to be a linguist.

Sometimes I look back at those days and I see what it was that got me inspired about linguistics and linguistic research.  If I hadn’t continued to bark up the phonology tree (though each class after his was somewhat of a disappointment), I certainly could have ended up as a phoneticist.  There’s a lot of room for phonetics in phonology, actually, particularly in the cognitive science approaches.  I think all three of these things converge in some way, if for no other reason than both being concerned with scientifically describable data with direct language interface.  In other words, both cognitive science and phonetics are among the very few contact points of hard science (biology, physics) and language.  Typology fits into this picture too, if you think of it as an offshoot of applied statistics interfacing with evolution, biology, migration, what have you.  Typology is an interesting grab-bag of domains, which I think takes a particularly large mind to grasp and is probably why Lewis is well suited to it.  It’s like majoring in world history.  The world is a large place, with lots of history, affected by an inconceivable number of factors, and those who can synthesize that knowledge are laudable.

My brain feels flushed with thoughts of career.  And today, I’m feeling determined to be a straight-backed eyes-forward engaged-in-my-life sort of individual.  This happens to me less than it ought, but if there’s anything less useful than being a defeatist by nature, it’s feeling defeated about being a defeatist.  I’m not getting much work done today, but I’m determined not to let it get the better of me.  I’ve been to class, finished my Quechua homework, emailed all my potential referees for the internal fellowship application whose deadline is coming up, and I even found time to blog.  I’m prepared for tomorrow, and I’m not going to feel swamped or behind on anything though I am, at turns, both.  Today, I do what I can, and revel in the very success of doing.

January 5th, 2010 | Tags: career, class, future, past, phonetics, section | Category: life, school | Comments Off

A pause.  A temporary lull between festive diversions and my furtive life.   It’s the last weekend before I start the fifth quarter of my graduate program.

It’s been long enough that I am not nervous whatsoever about the coming course load.  And long enough for me to feel like I’m not going to accomplish anything notable this quarter.  Edging closer to some inevitable department-wide acknowledgement that I’m a good student, and a poor researcher.   This PhD feels simultaneously easy and impossible – the work itself is trivial, yet the outcome is unachievable.   It’s not for lack of resources, or even an inability to understand my subject.   Failure is predicated merely on the fatalistic view of my own trajectory which prevents the fervent spark of inspired research from catching.  I’m green wood on a cool evening; building the fire is formulaic, but a achieving a toasty refuge is improbable.

Despite this, I’m looking forward to the return of a regular schedule.  I enjoy the somewhat tedious monotony of going to class – the endless reading, the hours of taking notes, and the cathartic final essays.  It’s a new year, and it would be disingenuous of me not to admit that the prospect of a fresh beginning doesn’t leave me a little hopeful that this will be the quarter I start making my mark.  To be honest, being a mediocre academic is still less disappointing than what I see as my alternative: a completely forgettable woman. This isn’t the note I intended to start this new year on, but fatalism and optimism need not always conflict.  I think this is going to be a good year.   I have a life I love, with good friends and engaging work.  I’m blessed in so many ways.  If I could only suppress this feeling of ultimate and unavoidable disappointment, I’d be sitting pretty indeed.

January 1st, 2010 | Tags: failure, future, musing, school | Category: life, school | Comments Off

I keep having dreams about a professor I didn’t choose to be my advisor, but that I strongly considered asking.   He is my favorite teacher by a fairly wide margin, and I find him personally amusing and good to work with.  On the other hand, he’s not really in my field, and expressly stated that he does not want to get sucked into work in neuroscience.  For those reasons, I think I made the right choice.

This hasn’t stopped me from a most amusing set of dreams about him all week.  Usually he’s being chummy with me, and making me feel like I’m good at stuff, and my work is worthwhile.  Last night I even dreamed that he was texting me at a party explaining how no one else in the class he’s teaching is paying attention and that I’m an excellent student doing excellent work.  It’s so ego-masturbatory, but it’s also an oasis of confidence in my otherwise Eeyore-prone life.  There’s something wonderful about waking up after having dreamed about being respected and admired by people  you respect and admire.

Then again, I also woke up convinced it was Saturday.  A sad reality to realize that it’s Thursday, and I have go to teach.  Not that section is that bad.  It’s just no Saturday.   Onward and upward.

October 22nd, 2009 | Category: life, school | Comments Off