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

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

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

I’m sitting here at the lab, waiting for the very last step in my data processing to finish.  I started with raw text files that the fMRI scanner outputs while you’re doing your business, and when this model finishes estimating, I’ll have a whole set of pictures of someone’s brain.  This is awesome.  It is also extremely time-consuming.  I’ve been working on it for the last four hours, and this is only one subject’s worth of data, for one portion of the study.  Oy.  This is why we’re trying to get this batch scripted.

Life, other than the data-processing portions, is going very well.  I acted quickly on this advisor thing and submitted to him an admission of my pipe dream project.  Turns out, he also thinks it’s cool and not impossible, and would be “happy to support this effort”.   In that he’s already given me a carte blanche for designing and running an fMRI study, and that I’m right in line to start something for my second QP… I’ve basically hit the jackpot.  It’s not going to make him any easier to work with, but it certainly makes me feel secure in my choice.  It’s nice to be listened to!

I had a really awesome section this morning, which was also a nice surprise, given how poorly this material went over in the previous sections earlier this week.  I changed it up quite a bit – had them work in small groups instead of all trying to solve the problem with me on the board.  Also we listened to The Beatles while we worked, and I thought that did a nice job of waking them up and getting them moving this morning.  9 am can be a little bit early for any kind of critical reasoning skills to be awake, so any little bit helps.  I’m definitely going to retry this music + phonology problems idea next week.

I was offered another research opportunity today which I wisely declined.  With this fMRI thing ready to plow ahead full steam (and full steam it should be, given how long this stuff takes), I just don’t really have time to dabble in other projects.  I did agree to record stimuli for this neat language contact experiment our resident creoleist is undertaking, but he understood that I was too busy to attach myself any more than that.  I did have a good idea of who else in our department would be good at this stuff, so hopefully my name dropping gets me some good karma points.

Geesh, it’s almost 5 already.  I keep thinking this thing is on it’s final rendering step… and then it’s not.  Time to go home and leave it to run?  Guess I won’t make it to my pretty brain pictures after all.

October 8th, 2009 | Tags: advisor, data, fmri, lab, meetings, research | Category: school | Comments Off

O, blog.  Without you where would I dump by brain overflow?  I mean, besides onto Lewis.

Much excitement in the first few weeks of school.  Notably, today I picked an advisor!  It’s the same person I’d had in mind for the last few quarters, but I finally just took the plunge.  It makes sense in certain ways, and it somewhat of a poor fit in others.  I’m trying really hard not to pigeonhole myself though, and take it for what it offers – opportunity, money,  resources, plans, goals… – and not worry too much about the ways in which I don’t fit the paradigm.  The truth of the matter is, I’m not a single-domain sort of person, and any advisor I pick is going to have a focus that’s not wholly my own.  So I’ve settled on a useful one, and now I need to make the best of it.

Being comfortable in your own skin is a very difficult thing to consistently be.  I’m feeling three times as comfortable being me this year than this time last year. TAing is going well; it’s not as terrifying as it could be, and my relationship to my students is only one facet of the nature of my studenthood.  My classes are going well, but again they only make up another small portion of my life, which is tempered by reality.  I have no idea what papers I’m going to write for either class, but as for now it’s not causing me any stress.  My advisor is teaching one, and said that a research proposal could be submitted in place of a paper.  Given that we’re working on developing a research proposal anyway, this could be a rather advantageous overlap.  My favorite professor is teaching the other one, and the subject is something I really do not excel in, but I’m feeling confident I can bend the matter into something useful for myself.

The strangest thing about being a second year is the odd semblance of a plan forming in the horizon.  It’s at times completely terrifying, and at others rather soothing.  Today, I feel soothed.  From this vista, I can see the four things that must happen between where I’m standing now, and my doctorate.  There’s a paper I must finish this year.  I’m not sure what that’s going to be on yet, but I have two nascent but promising ideas.   One easier than the other, the other more useful than the first.  One of them will get done.  And when it’s done, I’ll have a masters.  I have a second paper to do, the one which I intend to be this research project with said advisor.  It should be the pilot for the research that will be my dissertation.  When it’s done, and I’ve taken my oral exam, I advance to candidacy.  From there to the PhD is a blur of having no classes, and doing a lot of self-guided research.  This is where the architecture of the lab comes in particularly handy – some structure in an otherwise structureless life.  The only thing keeping life moving steadily forward – classes – are coming to a close.  After this year, we needn’t take classes full time, or at all.  Provided that I’ve finished the set amount before I write that second paper, my time is my own.  The idea of finally running out of classes to take seems impossible, but it’s true.  At some point, it’s research, not ritual.

On that note, I have some work for classes to undertake.  I should enjoy it while I can!

October 6th, 2009 | Tags: advisor, future, plans, research | Category: school | Comments Off

Day one of classes, finished.

My night closes with me feeling more confused, lost, and hesitant than I have been in a while.  This is probably okay.  Perhaps even expected, since you can’t really go through your PhD without having at least one period of aimless flailing and panicking about not having a future.

Despite this, my day was pretty good.  We had our first 103A class this morning, and I think it might be a TA’s dream.  A few of the kids I’ve taught in Lin 1 are in this class, and if they’re the measure by which I judge the overall character of the class, we’re in good shape.  The only students of mine that are signed up all got As in Lin 1, and I consider all very bright, promising linguists.  The professor teaching it is very laid back, and section attendance is not mandatory, so I’m hoping it all adds up to a stress free quarter at least in the TA domain.

I also had the first of my real classes today – just syntax.  We’re doing a really interesting topic in this class, and it’s being taught by one of my favorite professors.  I’ve had classes from him before, and he has the singular ability to teach very complex theory so carefully that it all ends up seeming intuitive and logical and very much digestible.  We’re definitely going to need that to get through this class, because we’re learning very much non-standard syntax, and it’s a system not a single one of us has worked with before.  But so far, it sounds really intriguing and I’m looking forward to getting into it.

We had a great hang-out of ling folks afterwards.  We chilled in our office for a while, and unlocked our secret door (it leads to the library next door, but you can’t actually get through it because it’s mostly blocked by a bookcase.   Got some posters hung up as well, and planned a cleaning day for us all to come in and tidy the room up.  It should be worth the work, because right now it’s covered in cobwebs and dust and uncollected homeworks stuffed in bookshelves from classes taught 5 or 10 years ago.  I love my classmates, and especially my office mates!  We all met later this evening for drinks at Sudwerk, and got to talk about how things are going so far and the new kids and such.

This talk is really what has left me feeling so conflicted.  Some fears of mine are feeling a bit confirmed with regards to the professor I was thinking about picking for my advisor, and the lab I’m trying to work in.  I’m just not sure this is going to be a good direction for me, and I need to do a lot of hard thinking about whether it’s one of those things worth fighting for, or one of those things that it’s time to walk away from.  But on the other hand, our hang out tonight also reminded me how much I love the people here, and how supportive and pleasant everyone is.  Even if my advisor issues are making life here frustrating, there are lots of people to help get me through it.

That is, if I survive the hot air balloon ride that’s knocking at my door at 5:45 tomorrow morning!

September 25th, 2009 | Tags: advisor, classes, drinks, fretting, friends, taing | Category: school | Comments Off