Good News for People Who Love Good News
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.