Tapping the Die Table: August 2011

My mom has stage 1 breast cancer (the tumor is < 2 cm), and goes in for surgery to remove the tumor today.

We found out a few weeks ago, but it has been a little difficult to think about: realizing that my parents are mortal is wierd, thinking about things they want or want to do and how to fit everything in before the end is saddening. This is not the end, and I know it. Probably the strangest part is that my brother and I are relatively unworried - we know our mom is a fighter, stubborn as all hell, unflinching and unbent when she faces (most) adversaries.

The surgery consists of putting a metal wire in her where the tumor is, followed by my dad DRIVING HER TO THE SURGERY CENTER IN THE NEXT TOWN (does this seem ridiculous to anyone else?), followed by the tumor removal surgery, where her lymph nodes will be tested on the spot to see if the cancer has spread to them. If it has, they will all be removed. If not, I think at least the closest one will be removed since they already took it out to test it. It will take an hour if all goes according to plan. She has two or three follow up appointments within the next few weeks. Her MRI to check for further breast cancer last week came back negative (huzzah!), and she will be monitored closely. This will be followed by 7 - 8 weeks of radiation (5 mins/day, every day) and 5 years of medication to control her hormone levels. phew.

Anyways, thoughts and prayers appreciated. Help Ma kick cancer in the face.

Monday, August 22, 2011

With a heavy heart...

I've been kind of debating whether or not to write this and share it publicly with everybody, but the blog is a platform for updating everybody about my life... So here it goes, even if some of you are aware of the situation that I find myself at the U of O.

On Friday, the man who was going to be my advisor through my time here in the School Psychology program, Ken Merrell, passed away due to a rare form of cancer. He found out about his cancer about 13 months ago and had emergency surgery to remove parts of his insides. They estimated that they had removed about 95% of the cancerous cells, but the remaining 5% were malignant. Ken started chronicling his experiences with cancer about a year ago (the first post was 366 days before he passed away), sharing insights, hopes, dreams, motivations, and most especially, fears and tough days. It was a brutal read, but I couldn't help but admire his beautiful writing, profound insights, and his obvious joy and love for those that surrounded him. I was told about his cancer about 11 months ago.

Ordinarily, this type of news would concern a potential student for a graduate program. If your advisor is going to pass away during the course of your studies, the mentorship aspect of a student-advisor relationship is lost. But, having met Ken only twice before hearing his news in early September, I could tell that Oregon was the place that I wanted to be (for education purposes, of course, I'd rather be surrounded by all of you!) and Ken was the man I wanted to learn from. Ken was not only a prolific researcher (he won this year's senior research award from the School Psychology division of the American Psychological Association), but he led a group of graduate students known as the Oregon Resiliency Project that was also prolific in the content the group developed and produced. The goal of ORP was to determine how to improve the resilience of children, specifically within schools, to improve mental health, to teach critical life skills for future success (empathy, cooperation, etc.--as Jess once noted, skills that aren't practiced outside of preschool, really), and to ultimately help all children within their surroundings in the hopes of giving them a comfortable, welcoming school environment. ORP was what my heart was set on, though there were other research groups for grad students that could potentially interest me. Unfortunately, Ken's illness meant that the alternative research groups became things I had to explore during the course of the year, especially as it became clear that Ken was not going to overcome his cancer.

Ken went through three different types of chemotherapies in the hopes of some sort of improvement. Yet each type of chemotherapy did not yield any sorts of positive results or news. At the end of the third treatment, Ken decided he was not going to pursue it any further.

But while Ken was fighting cancer, he still did everything and more that could be expected of an individual in his position. Another faculty member noted that he was functioning almost as if he didn't have cancer--that's how productive he was. He served as an advisor and a leader of our research group, where he would occasionally come to a meeting (and when he didn't, he would Skype in) to discuss an article and talk about projects group members were working on. Ken's presence on the third floor of HEDCO (HQ for our program) brightened everyone's spirits, even when he became increasingly thin and frail, and his presence around the building became less frequent.

It was inspiring and difficult to be in the position that I was in this past year. I wanted to be able to work with Ken, yet I knew it was unlikely he would make it through the school year. I explored the other research groups, but they don't quite trigger me like the topics we discussed in ORP*. Yet I appreciated when he would ask me how I was doing, how the oftentimes difficult first year was going, how he wrote me an email appreciating my efforts when I led a group discussion, and how he took me aside at an end-of-the-year party that we were throwing in his honor to introduce me to his wife and ask me if I had any leads on securing a research assistantship for this upcoming year. He, of course, was the one who had secured the funds to bring me to Oregon in the first place. He was just making sure I had future support for my education, himself knowing he wouldn't be around for much longer.

Ken made it through most of the summer. His wife provided a reluctant SPSY community with updates on his condition and his diminishing physical and cognitive abilities. However, he held on to see his grandson his born. He passed away two days later.

I've been trying to digest and understand my feelings the past couple of days. I had previously gone through the five stages of grief in May or so, when he decided to finish with chemo, and I knew the day for him to pass away was going to arrive at any point in time this summer. But the grief came back on Friday, though it was much more punctuated than the first time I had experienced it (it helps to be distracted and not around others who were his advisees). I suspect it will hit me again when I go to his memorial services this upcoming weekend.

But I have resolved that if I continue on to get a Ph.D. (harder, now, that my primary advisor is no longer with us... the motivation to get just a Master's and leave Oregon is strong, currently), that my research will be in his honor. Ken did tremendous work (and a very accessible read for academic purposes), influenced the lives of many others, and gave back to all. I can only hope to do the same for him and his legacy/memory.

Because when a potential advisor calls you and tells you that he wants you above all other candidates that he interviewed, it is hard to not want to repay that faith.

*Yes please, mental health prevention and promotion. I'll also have some resilience on the side, thank you very much.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

What I learned this year about public transit

So this past year, living in Silicon Valley without a car (and without the money to rent one much), I learned a ton about public transit. Now, I have to admit that the first 8 months or so of the year I was bitter about my 4 roommates having cars and me not. They could go to doctor's appts at 9am and be at work by 9:30, whereas I would make it the 15 minute drive to work via 2 buses by 11am. My work happened to be very understanding of this, so it was fine, but I still had resentment.

But then, a miracle (a "real world miracle"?) happened. I started to embrace my crappy-California-public-transit-ways. I started to feel proud at the new routes I would find, the 193736 different ways I knew to get to Berkeley and back, the fee sharing with other counties' transit systems and my Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority bus pass.

After that experience, thinking about my future and not wanting to have a car, and thinking about climate change and how the government spends money, I very firmly believe that people should be able to live without cars more often and it should be easier. I am trying to move to Boston or NY and those are two of the very few cities where it is okay to not have a car. Its just striking to me that the norm is a single person in a large vehicle that guzzles up finite fuel supplies and emits toxins into the air. Public transit, of course, is not perfect (MRSA on Bart seats? nice), but I just don't understand why it isn't more of a topic of budget conversation.

So here are two awesome articles that may help blow your mind about public transit. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/07/the-geography-of-how-we-get-to-work/240258/#slide15

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/07/transportation-as-a-civil-rights-issue/

What do other people think? Am I an economically-ignorant, left-coast liberal on this issue? Or just too poor to buy a car so trying to justify my life? :)

(and excuse this post not being well-written, my mind has been mush ever since I stopped working).

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Grad School Miracles

Sorry that I’ve been away for a while. The past two weeks have been a combination of busy and a serious case of writer’s block. I had been putting many extra hours of overtime work for my research assistantship this summer. The project that I am on held a conference for all of the schools with student participants—I believe we are tracking over 4,000 students over the course of five years—and I was called on for both data compilation (no easy feet for multiple variables for 40 schools) and conference logistics. I followed this by spending a weekend and a couple of days at home in the Bay Area. It could have been more, had I not been incredibly fortunate. More on that later.

The writer’s block has been particularly troublesome to deal with. I have never been much of a writer (it’s even amusing to me to think of myself as one, but I guess that’s what we are doing here), so it’s been stumping me how to overcome it. I would think of some ideas of topics to write… but never felt like I could fully flush anything out. But I think I’ve got something to share today, as I’m on a plane passing Mt. Shasta to my right on my way to Eugene via Portland. Which almost didn’t happen.

A friend in the program has dubbed the some everyday, life-saving situations related to graduate school as “grad school miracles.” She was one of the first to experience these grad school miracles, of course. She had been working on a literature review for her advisor in the Knight Library—the main library at the University of Oregon. During the last few weeks of each term, the library is opened for a 24 hour period of time, accommodating for students cramming for exams and completing assignments. The friend had apparently scanned articles to be reviewed and saved her document to the computer she had been working on (her laptop, at the time, was on a serious decline), but had failed to send it or save it to another source.

Much like at Colby, the computers wiped themselves clean overnight on a 24 hour basis. The morning after my friend had put in tremendous amounts of hard work, she realized that she, personally, did not have a copy of that work available to her. I’m sure she felt an immediate sense of dread: the one where you curse yourself for being so stupid, your heart drops into a pit in your stomach, and you can only look up at the sky and question your foolishness. Personally, I also drop a number of f-bombs. My friend probably sprinted her way back to the library to try to get to the computer she was working on the previous day. A student was at the same computer, and the way my friend described it, you could tell that she had been working there for a long time. There were multiple Red Bulls, stacks of books, and paper was scattered everywhere.

My friend asked the student if she could check the computer for her lost documents, fearing that the computer had indeed wiped itself clean. The student browsed through multiple files before finding that all of my friend’s work was still on the computer. Because the computer had been in use since the previous evening, it hadn’t been cleared of any lingering documents. My friend saved everything and emailed it to herself. She proclaimed her first “grad school miracle.”

Since this term has been introduced, there have been a number of grad school miracles. Personally, I had a couple of them. For instance, I was able to salvage an excruciatingly difficult assignment, when I though I had messed it up completely. A different friend—a master’s student—just obtained a research assistantship, even when master’s students hardly ever received full funding through the school. Grad school miracles do exist, even when you might feel like everything around you is lost or crumbling.

I had a grad school miracle today, though I’m not particularly proud of it. I was on my way to the Oakland airport, planning on catching a flight to Eugene from home. I had purposefully booked to leave today, as it is the day after my mom’s birthday, and about the only time I could allot myself after pulling those extra hours for Conference preparation. I’m sure they expected me at the office, but I wanted to be able to spend extra time in the Bay. So I was absolutely excited when I booked a flight back to Eugene for a $106, even though non-Allegiant Air flights (which are super cheap, Oakland to Eugene), generally cost well over $150. At the time of my booking, debt ceiling negotiations were still occurring and the Federal Aviation Administration was not collecting taxes on flights. Some airlines were bumping up prices and pocketing the extra fare costs. Alaska Airlines, which I am flying currently, was one of the few airlines that were passing the savings onto the customer. I was excited.

But I got to the airport this morning, and I had difficulty inputing my confirmation number. Which seemed really unusual—flying back and forth from the East Coast to the West Coast had made me a relative expert on handling everything airport related. So I went to the line facing ticket counter, and looked at my pre-boarding printout.

I had that realization. I had booked for August 16^th. Yesterday. Fuck.

I couldn’t believe my idiocy as I went to the counter to explain my situation. They re-directed me to call customer service—they couldn’t book me at the ticket counter anymore*. So when I called, I encountered a very bitchy customer service representative who essentially was yelling at me to explain that I was going to have to pay $313 to book a flight to Eugene. And that she could not give me any credit for my flight that I had paid for the previous day because the airlines had cancelled my ticket since I had failed to show up. Needless to say, she wasn’t who I needed to deal with.

After calling Gillian, Mom, and Dad, there were a number of possible solutions. I could take a train for $130, a bus for $80, or rebook for the $313. All sounded like terrible options. I tried to plead my case to the ticket counter again, asking them to just send me to Portland and I would pay the $140 ticket from Portland to Eugene. No go.

So, with basically no hope left, I tried calling customer service again, hoping that a different person would be on the other end of the line. A woman named Kelly picked up, and she was immediately more sympathetic than the other, heartless woman. She said she could book me on the flight that was leaving in 40 minutes that was leaving for Portland and put me on a flight to Eugene, arriving at the same time that I would have gotten in on the previous day. She was going to charge me $25 for a same-day change fee. I had to ask her twice to be sure if it was okay, and if it was still going to get me to Portland and then Eugene. Kelly, goddess divine, had saved my day, as well as my checking account.

Grad school miracle.

*By the way, how stupid is that? That is completely dumb and not useful at all. Who was the idiot that made that decision?

Thursday, August 4, 2011

20!

http://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/list/

Below is an excerpt from the Forbes article that explains how the think tank that produced this list decided ranking order:

"Our annual ranking of the 650 best undergraduate institutions focuses on the things that matter the most to students: quality of teaching, great career prospects, graduation rates and low levels of debt. Unlike other lists, we pointedly ignore ephemeral measures such as school “reputation” and ill-conceived metrics that reward wasteful spending. We try and evaluate the college purchase as a consumer would: Is it worth spending as much as a quarter of a million dollars for this degree?

...The rankings are based on five general categories: Post Graduate success (30%), which evaluates alumni pay and prominence, Student Satisfaction (27.5%), which includes professor evaluations and freshman to sophomore year retention rates, Debt (17.5%), which penalizes schools for high student debt loads and default rates, Four Year Graduation Rate (17.5%) and Competitive Awards (7.5%), which rewards schools whose students win prestigious scholarships and fellowships like the Rhodes, the Marshall and the Fulbright."

I perhaps shouldn't put a ton of stock in these lists, but I do. They give me more reasons to be proud to say I'm a Colby alumna. It makes me happy to know that Colby fares well (20th in the country, 17th among private institutions, 10th in the northeast) against many other excellent schools in our country.

After looking at the picture above for a few minutes, I got extremely nostalgic. Miss that place, miss and love you all.