Current mood:tired
What an amazingly frustrating and tiring and infuriating day! On a side note before I begin for some reason I have a tendency to want to spell amazingly 'amasingly' – why I do not know. So here is what happened:
1.
Statistics homework needs to be redone. To call this class bothersome would be to pay it a complement. I have not had a class as inane as since… well I had better not go there quite yet. It is a terrible class and is taught terribly as well. For one thing the professor who teaches it does not do the grading, but rather assigns his teaching assistants to do so. Unfortunately their grading is not at all consistent, and I am unluckily stuck with the grader who somehow consistently gives lower marks than the other graders (I guess it really is consistent). On one homework assignment she took off points because I said that the data was "skewed" as opposed to "not normally distributed" (because she is unable to make the mental connection). But in the homework I got back this morning she took off because I did not say the data was "skewed"! She also took off because I wrote the clause "… p-value = less than 0.0004." She wrote on the side, "I read this as p-value -- 0.0004, not as p-value < 0.0004." I will admit that my construction of the clause is sloppy, but in my defence that was how the teacher himself wrote it (I just copied it out of his notes)! Secondly, and infinitely more important is that she is not correct grammatically! When I rewrote the assignment (we can redo homework for new marks) I wrote her a nice argument on how, due to the construction of the clause, her interpretation could not be correct logically (I would reproduce it here but I do not have the paper on me… I'll edit it back in here later when I have it).
2.
I get a nice letter from my father with 'helpful advice' on what I should do with my life. I will let you the reader in on a little secret… I am massively in debt due to loans from my stint in medical school. I will eschew most of the details of the letter. Except… "Consider going back to medical school. Not to harp on a dead horse, but doctors DO make the kind of money to repay your loans AND there are programs to repay loans when you become a doctor that are NOT there for most other fields unless you join the military, which I do not recommend."
Now unless you are on my friends list I am sure you are unfamiliar with my life so let me you give a short synopsis of the last 5 years. My initial goal after graduating with a Biology degree was to go to medical school. Unfortunately due to reasons I am still not sure of (my GPA and MCAT scores were fine) I did not get into medical school in my first attempt. So I used what little money I had from working and went back to school for a summer and a semester. I took a couple of history classes and ecological biology classes. I loved them. I was inspired to study again. I knew where I needed to be in life – academics. My history teacher tried rather strongly to get me to go to China for a semester and then come back and go to graduate school for Chinese/Japanese history. My ecology classes too were sublime – one class in particular (in a class of over 100 students) always turned into a conversation between the professor, two other students and myself. The heaviest decision now was, "history or biology?"
But my parents still hoped that I would go to medical school though (I did not have this hope), and very early on (during the summer) offered to pay for all of my applications (which cost me over $2000 in the first round and took me 5 months to pay off). They also encouraged me to apply to a Caribbean medical school (St. George's University) because they had a very good reputation and because they allow you start mid year (as in you can start in January as opposed to having to wait until September). Fine. It was their money; I will humour them. In late November, after a rather comical week of breaking up with my then girl-friend and having my mobile phone drown, I found out that I had been accepted to SGU. My parents were ecstatic.
I went and talked to my advisor (who also happened to be the professor of my 'conversational' class). "Total tuition comes out to $250,000 for the degree," I said. "It's not worth it," he replied, "every time students come to me about this I tell them it's not worth it. It's not worth the debt. Besides in the conversations I've had with you I get the feeling you'd prefer academics. Doesn't the life of a college professor sound great to you ["it really really does," I thought]. You get to be around students, make your own hours and you get off in the summers. Unless you really love medicine ["it's just interesting"], and you have to really love it ["I don't"] you won't survive. I really get the impression you'd rather be here…"
I talked to my Dad, "Don't listen to him! He's not looking out for you he's looking out for the university. Of course he doesn't want you to go to medical school. It's in his interest for you to stay there!"
In the end I fell to rather overwhelming peer-pressure and the adoration of my family, and against what I knew to be my better judgement did not listen to my professor. A month and a half later I stepped off a tiny aircraft onto the tarmac and into the thick humidity of a pitch back night. The very first thought that popped into my head was, "what the hell have I gotten myself into." The words of my professor haunted my for the next 2 years.
I hated medical school. My list of grievances are as follows: there was nothing intellectual about it, there was no critical thinking, only rote memorisation; we were discouraged from engaging professors in conversation in class (to this day I still find this bizarre); professors were condescending and treated students as inferiors and not as future colleagues; the vast majority of students were mindless, bratty, rich kids who lacked even a shred individuality, creativity or the ability to see past their own existence and had the maturity of high school freshmen. I was amazed the entire time that I was there that these students have this awesome chance to experience a beautiful unique culture in a wonderfully mirthful setting but none of them, neither student nor professor, were grateful for it. All I ever heard was bitching and condescension.
Not that I did not do my share – it is difficult to live in a place where you are confined to a radius of only 2 miles, the weather never changes, and you eat the same thing and see all the same people for 4 straight months – but I was never hateful about it. And not that I did not meet some absolutely wonderful people either – my 'roommates' and associates and especially Lyra (that is not her real name, but rather an allusion to the Lyra from His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman – because I swear Pullman based the character in both personality and looks on my friend at age 10).
I should rephrase, medical school was a complicated entanglement of hate/love where I felt as though my brain was in a glass jar trying to break free, but I was unable to crack it open because of not wishing to disappoint my family, overwhelming debt, unwavering loyalty to my friends, and a stubborn desire to not quit what I has started. I went through a perilous year and a half like this, unable to get out of the spin and unable to forget the words of my professor. Well the jar cracked on its own – and with a month left in my 4th term enough was enough and I decided it was time to leave. I was happy it was all over. The only person who thought I was doing the right thing was Lyra. My memory of the event is perfectly clear; she smiled wide causing a whimsical crease in her upper lip, clapped her hands, quickly put them to her lips and then gave me a hug saying, "I can't believe you actually did it! I'm so happy for you!". I have never felt closer to a human being than at that moment.
After that I came back to the States and started graduate school for Biology (should I have gone into History? Maybe – but that's a different topic, and anyway it was the only option open to me at the time) which I love. Graduate school is the most wonderful intellectual experience I have ever had. I have small classes, professors who are congenial, and I am allowed to think and go in any direction I want. I get to teach! (which is the most fun thing I have ever done). And the coup de gras is that I am encouraged to ask questions and make comments in class!
I cannot erase the past – I racked up more than quite a bit of debt from medical school, and I know it is going to be very difficult to get rid of it. And I know it limits my options. But it infuriates me when my father brings up this dead conversation. He knows what I went through. He knows where I am at at life now. Suggesting that I go back is not constructive. I am in massive debt because it. It is painfully obviously that my brain was constructed to be a doctor of philosophy not one of medicine. He needs to drop the line of argument.
3.
I do crap on my Stats midterm. You know, the class from above, the only bad class I have had in graduate school; that one. Fortunately it is not really that big of a deal – it is not really worth that much in calculating the final grade. But there are notes on it from my professor (I do not know why he graded it) saying that he is confused to why I am writing my answers the way I am (I am confused too! But it is because the course syllabus is awkward and difficult to untangle and because I am made dumbfounded by the Zen paradox that is the homework correcting which serves as my template made by the TA assigned to me).
4.
I get a really confusing letter from my credit card company about a fraudulent charges claim I made a while back (some how someone, I do not even know, was able to purchase a aeroplane ticket with my credit card number, even though he had neither the correct name nor actual card). I will have to deal with this tomorrow
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