Hieronymo's mad againe.

I'm starting my third year in grad school, and this has prompted a number of reflections, about things both serious and frivolous. Things are different now, and one of the fastest ways to know things are different is to look in the mirror or open my closet door. I was a biology major in college, and school and work were my life. My standard uniform was a beaten up pair of jeans and a grey t-shirt, or a green button-down with sulfuric acid holes from TA-ing chem lab. I also didn't shower all that much (because, if showers take ten minutes, and you go a week without showering, you've just saved yourself an hour, and those hours add up.). It's also fair to say that especially my last two years, I was carrying a pretty big chip on my shoulder, and the yuck probably resulted in fewer verbal "screw you"s being dealt out. My first job after graduation was interning in a molecular tox lab. So I added showers into my routine and phased out the cruddiest of the jean...

It's finals week, and I've just uploaded my second-to-last paper. I've spent the majority of my days just writing the past couple weeks and it hit me.... If some ambassador from the future had told ten-year-old me that "One day, when you grow up, you're still going to be in school. You're going to get paid to go to school, and you'll get to study whatever you want. You'll spend most of your time reading and writing about things you choose yourself and think are important" I probably would have thought this was a pretty great deal. And it is...at least the part of the time when you're not completely malnourished (since you haven't had time to make it to the grocery store) exhausted (since you have bizarre nightmares every time you sleep) and crazy (due to the malnourishment, exhaustion, and stress). I don't even know what to say about this semester. It's been hard. Starting a marriage, starting a a doctorate, and starting life ...

In January of 2009 I moved here and enrolled in an MPH program, in Health Promotion, Education and Behavior. I didn't really have a clue what I was doing, except that I had to do something, and it had something to do with this. I was scared, unfunded, gutsy, terrified. Social science wasn't an easy transition. It's fascinating, and I love it now, and I think "heath decisionmaking" will ultimately be the one overarching theme through my body of work. But at the beginning....I would have told you there was no objective way to measure things like that, and people who thought they could describe/influence those processes were crazy and arrogant. I vaguely remember saying that "qualitative research" was an oxymoron - that qualitative work was the necessary, preliminary work people did as a precursor to real research, which is controlled and experimental. When I started, I didn't know what would happen, how long I'd stay, what degree I'd get (MPH, ...