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I went to UChicago last weekend for my first round of grad school interviews. It went great, and the grad school environment seems like a great fit for me. However, I’m going to spare details on the schools until I’ve finished all interviews and have started to hear back about whether or not I’ve been accepted to them.
I am now sitting in the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas. The UTSW interviews are tomorrow, and the room they’ve put me up in is SWANK. Probably one of the biggest rooms I’ve stayed in. Ever.
On that note, I want to officially declare the biology grad school interview process to be the most amazing experience that a college grad can go through. It contrasts so strongly to the application processes of other educational programs (law/med/business/etc school) that there is danger of being blinded. After a pretty painless paper application, those applicants who get past the first round are invited to interview at the schools, for which the school pays for airfare and all expenses while the applicant is there. And they throw booze and food at you at every turn.
The interviews themselves are great, since they are more of a conversation about science than anything else. And I love talking about science. The researchers I talked to at Uchicago are doing some really cool things that were fascinating to hear about, and I expect to hear of many more interesting projects before my interviews are done.
My interview schedule is UChicago (done last week), UTSW (done tomorrow), Duke (next weekend) and WashU (early March). While it’s great to spend this time visiting schools and talking to interesting people who share my nerdiness levels and love for biology, the 4-day work-weeks are problematic. I can’t really get any experiments started, though it’s nice to have some time to catch up on data analysis.
As promised:
Picture by Jenny Wei.
Corn on a stick, covered with mayo, chese, and chile sauce. Mmmmmm…
The gf and I celebrated three years of being together this past wednesday, September 10. This date is really quite artificial, as it is roughly on the day that we had decided to be officially “dating.” It was originally either the 9th or the 11th, but I like 10 much better as a number (the gf won’t let me switch it to 10/10, though) since I can remember it, and the 11th would have been a poor choice for obvious reasons.
We went to a nice Italian restaurant here in Guanajuato, called Chao Bella. We had been there the week before with a larger group, but didn’t get much since we’d eaten a giant meal earlier in the day. And it was expensive. Comparitively. So we decided to go for our anniversary and splurge, spending nearly $12 between the two of us on some absolutely fantastic pizza. I think a picture will be much better than words…
And it was even better than it looks. So if you’re in Guanajuato, I highly recommend checking this place out.
After three weeks of smelling delicous smells and seeing things that looked like they would taste delicious, the gf and I finally decided to bite the bullet and eat some street food. And we were handsomely rewarded (with happiness, not health!).
We figured that we had already been sick and were likely immune enough to the common food bugs as long as we were careful not to eat anything too crazy. The two food items that we see every day, in the park across the street from our flat, are corn and ice cream.
But this is no regular corn. You can choose if you want it boiled or grilled, and then get it covered with any combination that you wish of lime, mayo, salt, cheese, “cream”, and some sort of sweet chile powder. I put cream in quotes because people here seem to call a lot of different things cream, and I’m not sure what that actually means. Except delicious.
You might notice that I haven’t posted for nine days… I have no excuse; I’ve just been lazy.
It appears that the last thing that I mentioned was starting salsa. So I’ll try to rememeber as many things between then and now as I can. Here we go:
So the first and second salsa classes went well enough. I didn’t enjoy myself, but the experience wasn’t completely awful. We had private instruction both days, in a nice space in a bar called Cuba Mia, and I even got a bit of a handle on some of the extremely simple moves. It was very clear, however, that even two weeks of private instruction would leave me completely incapable of dancing salsa…
The journey is already almost over! We passed the halfway mark on Sunday, and time is still flying by. It helps that we have given ourselves more to do and have been getting into more difficult grammar in class. We’ve been talking about the use of indirect and direct pronouns, which is done in and extremely confusing way (to me) in Spanish, especially since I don’t really even understand the similar grammar in English. I’ve also been trying to spend more time reading Harry Potter in Spanish. I’ve made it through about 7 pages so far, but damn is it slow going! The main problems are pronoun usage (I never know who or what is being referred to) and the use of tenses that I am not familiar with (which includes most tenses). Thankfully, I had purchases a book of verbs that goes through every conjugation of the 300 most common verbs. That thing is extremely useful.
We also have a new maestro this week, who is animated, fun, and funny. She seems quite young, and said that she studies linguistics at her university, so she also knows a little of several other languages. Her demands of us are more rigorous than with past teachers, so I think we are getting a bit more out of this week of clases.
On a different topic, we had been intending to do salsa lessons since week 2, but we were sick the entire week so that fell through. We finally got the chance on Monday, and I must admit that I was not looking forward to it. But I always tell the gf “no” for these kinds of things, so I decided to suck it up and do it. It was sort of fun, but I felt like entire time.
Since both of us are absolute beginners to salsa (and to dancing in general, for me), we were given our own instructor, who is a very nice, handsome, young guy who speaks a little English. He is very animated, as one might expect of a dance instructor, and finds our mistakes amusing (but not in a bad way). The rest of the class was off in a separate room doing more complicated stuff, and every time I looked over I just thought, “I really hope I don’t have to try doing that any time soon.” And it seems I won’t!
The lesson went well and I sort of had fun, though I felt like an ass the entire time. As everyone who knows me will agree, I do not like flinging my body around in front of people and get frustrated quickly when doing something that I suck at and have no interest in. If I am simply not interested, but can do something, it’s no problem. And if I am interested but suck, I can get over my frustration to get something done. But when both conditions are negative I get angry, embarrassed, and quit as soon as I get the chance.
This was a lot like that. I left the lesson feeling okay, but like I had just spent an hour making a complete fool of myself. I’m pretty sure I didn’t look half as bad as I felt that I did, and am sure that no one would have cared if I had, but it is just a personal issue that I have.
So yesterday, as the day wore on, I began to dread more and more going to salsa that night. A couple hours beforehand, I just decided that I couldn’t do it. Why subject myself to feeling like an ass while doing something that I have zero interest in? Well, it turns out that the answer to this question is that if I didn’t feel like an ass then I would have to be an ass. Because the gf was not happy that I didn’t want to do this.
So I ultimately decided to suck it up and force myself to attend these lessons. After all, I only have to do it 6 more times- only 6 more hours of feeling like an ass. And it will make the gf happy, so in the end it will be worth it. Plus I’ll have the bonus of being able to (poorly) dance salsa at a really basic level, which is probably an asset. Or perhaps an ass-set.
It took me most of last night’s lesson to accept my fate, and now I am back to neutral, my normal state of being.
Today is a nice relaxing day; the weather is great, we don’t really have any work we have to do, and we’re healthy! In the park across the street, some sort of festival or otherwise loud activity has been going on all day, with bouts of drumming, dancing, singing, and the playing of various musical instruments. The quality has ranged from interesting to bad to meh (an expression of disinterest). We have generally avoided the sights, though the sounds are totally unavoidable.
Since we were pretty healthy yesterday we decided to hit up all of the nearby museums. There are around 11 that our touristy map mentions, and we went for numbers one through five.
We started the day in Cafe Conquistador, had some drinks and looked through our map and guidebook (which of course also required looking through our dictionaries).
Our map presented the places in exactly the order we would run into them if we started walking down Juarez, though they were all on the street just North of that main drag. So we left the cafe and went to our first destination, the Museo Iconografico del Quijote.
Not a great food picture, but you can see that cacus strips (green).
I take pride in my willingness to try most food items and make it a point to try new things when given the chance, but while on this trip I haven’t been exposed to much that can’t frequently be found in the states. The only new food item that I have gotten to try so far is cactus (though I have no idea what kind).
I first had it on accident. Since I started taking cipro, I needed to replenish my gut flora, which Activia yogurt claims to do. Though I haven’t found any studies supporting this, and am not that willing to do trials on myself, I figure that the stuff is delicious regardless so I might as well give it a shot.
The Oxxo store next door carries it, and I quickly ran in one morning last week before class to get some. There were a variety of flavors, several of which contained wheat as well as the normal fruits, and one that had a pineapple on it (I unimpressively recognized the word piña, as any American could have done) and what looked like some other green fruits, so I bought it and took off to class.
After sitting down and pulling out my notebooks and dictionaries, I pulled the top off and gave it a try. The taste was surprising, and I was first afraid that I had gotten a spoiled bottle. But I was on cipro and my belly was screwed up anyway, so I tasted it again. That time I was pretty confident that I tasted celery. Yes, celery. So I looked at the other two flavors written on the label and then consulted my dictionary. The three flavors were piña, nopal, and apio, which are pineapple, cactus, and celery, respectively. This explained the weird taste, since I was drinking yogurt with celery and cactus in it… But it was delicious.
The second cactus preparation that I had was in scrambled eggs, so I actually got to have strips of the stuff (pictured above). I was generally unimpressed. It had little taste and was slimy in texture, so I probably will not be having it again (unless it’s in yogurt!).
mmmm... generic cipro...
Sure, it’s a bad idea to just let anyone get antibiotics (for health reasons as well as for the appearance of resistant bugs), but I can’t help but be glad anyway. Thinks to cipro I have turned back into a whole human being. Of course, I’m missing some of my oh-so-friendly gut flora, but they’ll be back before too long and I can deal with the poor food digestion in the meantime.
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