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All Over Again
Ten years ago I arrived in Loma Linda, California and attempted to meet the three other naïve souls in my MD/PhD program, only to discover every last one of them was cool enough to have homes outside of the United States. Today, the final member of our tetrad crossed the stage to receive her second…
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Cult of Ignorance
If only he were alive today…
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Inside the PhD Program
Somehow I managed to sleep for twelve hours last night. I thought I’d take a “short nap” at around 8 PM, and basically ended up waking at 8 AM this morning. Huh. Oh, also it’s Rapture Day. Having made a similar mistake more than a hundred years ago, Seventh-Day Adventists know what to do. Anyway,…
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Operation Turkey Cook
Let’s start with the news you were dying to hear: Operation Turkey Cook was a success. In addition to preparing a delicious bird, Rachel and I created a sumptuous feast that is bound to have us eating leftovers for a week or more. While listening to This American Life, we made cranberry sauce, asparagus, cornbread…
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Is “Academic Integrity” a Significant Issue or Just Another Moral Panic?
This story showed up on TechDirt the other day and it dovetails nicely with another “hot button” topic in academia we’ve been discussing in class: Plagiarism. Over the past several years, the academic world has worked itself into a bit of a frenzy over these issues, turning to anti-plagiarism tools like Turnitin.com and, in my…
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Here’s the Windup
We’ve got our second test on Monday, so this week I’ve been more and more occupied with studying and preparing for that. In other words, I’m going to be less busy starting this coming Tuesday. Last week our good friend Kyle (formerly of this now-defunct blog, currently with no internet home sans Facebook) made good…
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First Test Down
My grad school class had its first test yesterday. I’d say that it went pretty well, and not just because the multiple-choice section was accidentally made from the answer key. The essay questions will likely carry a lot more weight now, but I’m as cautiously optimistic as I can be after a test I spent…
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Round and Round We Go
Studying has more or less pushed me underground for the past week—we’ve got our first biochem test tomorrow. A side effect is that I’ve been unwittingly collecting pictures of metabolic cycles drawn (and redrawn) on various whiteboards. It started innocuously enough with me simply intending to “look at it later,” but instead of doing that…
Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.