Cohort Attrition

Attrition, in psychology terms, is the amount of participants that drop out of an experiment. For researchers, attrition poses threats to internal validity (the control you have over an experiment) and (in my opinion) external validity (the relevance your experiment has to the outside world). It’s undesirable regardless of how you frame it.

We began our time in the program with seven individuals: five doctoral students and two masters’ students. Over the course of year one, we lost a doctoral student. Her heart was not in the program and had basically promised herself that she would give it a try for a term or two to see if it fit. It didn’t. It also didn’t help when she was paying for terms, when we had been promised funding as doctoral students. Over the course of year two, it looks like we will be losing two. One dropped early in the Fall; she realized she didn’t want to be a school psychologist, and when our faculty made it more difficult to switch down to a MA degree, she dropped. She moved home. At the very least, she found out that she wanted to be a literacy specialist in elementary schools, something that she may not have found out had she not done our first year field study or second year practicum. Finally, one of my friends is leaving town tomorrow. She came in with narrowly defined interests (working with students with autism), was told she would receive the type of training that she wants, and she hasn’t really found the promise/potential of the program to be the case. She also has a long-distance relationship that would become a near-distance relationship when she moves back. So there’s that.

The attrition of the doctoral students—it’s me and one other girl—coupled with the loss of our two masters students (who will be completing their internships, requirements for their degrees, off-campus, one locally but one on the East Coast) means a significant shift in the dynamics of my friendship circles in Eugene. Additionally, we “adopted” two girls from a special education masters program into our cohort, but they have already graduated and will be looking for jobs (one will be in North Bend, which is not to be confused with being north of Bend, because it’s not in Central Oregon and actually on the coast, southwest of actual Bend).

I think it’s going to prove to be a large contrast next year, where the in-built group of friends/support system will have largely disappeared. Fortunately, I am trying to involve myself more with Frisbee, and I’m becoming solid friends with the current first years. So there’s that.

But ultimately, the cohort attrition looks bad for our program. While our professors are super about supporting our professional goals, it reflects poorly on those applying here. They’ll recognize that 60% of the doctoral students in my cohort are no longer there (I think a little lower percentage for the cohort above us), hopefully, and ask us why that is the case. And I’ll have to be brutally honest: this program does not know what the hell it is or where it is going.

The one thing, though, that our program does well, is attracting lovely people. Out of the 25 or so people in the program as a whole, I really do not care for one individual and am ambivalent about a couple more (who, to be fair, have their own things/families to attend to). Fortunately, though, I have been happy to share my time, my thoughts, and my struggles with the people of my cohort. Unfortunately, people are moving along, and they are going to do their thing, and hopefully be in a happier place than they were here in the program.

So much has changed since you graduated two years ago and since I left Colby one year ago but a few things remain the same.  I’ve compiled a short list of the Colby legacies that remain strong in my life.

1)   I still love die (we knew that that would never change… I mean, seriously, I even make sure to always travel with a die, just in case)

2)   I still sleep with a teddy bear named Bear (pre-Colby, but a legacy none the less).

3)   The desk that I started to build at Colby is still just a big pile of wood.

4)   Whenever I’m getting to know someone and we begin to talk about friends, family, relationships and the like, I always find myself wishing that they could meet you (each and every last one of you).  I always think to myself, if they could only meet you, they would have a profoundly better understanding of who I am, who I care about, what I value, and who inspires me.  I repeatedly arrive at the conclusion that this fucking newblet can’t possibly know who I am until they meet my friends from Colby!

And it’s for the fourth reason that I feel like I owe you an apology for not working a little harder to keep in touch.  I could give you the nonsense about how school is a ton of work and that I’ve been super busy but it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been pretty lame.  From this point forward, I am going to become a regular contributor to this blog.  That said, today is an absolutely wonderful day, let me tell you why:

I told a very special girl (her name is Aka) that I love her - and the feeling is mutual (In reality, she said it first and stole my thunder while I was working up the courage to say it, but we’re going to ignore that detail and we won’t ever bring that up again will we?  K thanks!) And I now have the opportunity to tell the friends that I hold most dear to me that I love them.  I love you - I mean it, from the bottom of my heart… The apex, if you will. 

Now, when I say that I love you, rest assured that it isn’t just me being hyperemotional because of this girl.  When I say that I love you, I’m talking about the type of love that inspires and fuels me, the type of love that makes me weepie with joy – weepie, like the time that Isaac willed me his pink Barbie scooter and I started to cry because I was so happy, so happy that I needed to hold Jess’s hand and then, I wiped the tears from my eyes, tossed the die, plunked, and started crying even more. 

Keep doing what you’re doing - I love it.

All mushy-gushy feelings aside, I had a great first year in medical school.  I studied a lot, I cut open dead people, I made a party hat for my roommate’s birthday (Sam Levine for those of you who know him) and came barging into his room at 6:30 AM with my other roommate wearing nothing but briefs and bowties and forced it on him, I cut up an entire Victoria’s Secret catalogue and hid all of the pictures among my roommates’ belongings, and this summer, I’m playing BUDA and chillin’ at home with my father (who retires in 2 days) and working on our house.  Life is good.

<3 & <:3>~  4ever,

(Love and Mice Forever)

Kevin

That Puppy Exhaustion

I spent the last weekend being the volunteer coordinator at an ultimate tournament last weekend. I was very much a jack-of-all-trades, organizing my army of volunteers with prescribed roles, helping to paint field lines, setting up and taking down Frisbee central and Spin Ultimate tents, renting a U-Haul van to transport scaffolding, tables, and kegs, and filling in for those that were backing out at the last minute.

I also happened to volunteer to dogsit for a friend who was going out of town for his wife’s graduation up in Portland. I was charged with taking care of a 6-month-old pup named Toby, a recently adopted mutt (the guess is that is part Golden, part Aussie Shepard). Toby was my shadow for the entire weekend, hopping into the car with me as I moved back and forth from our Open and Women’s sites.

One of my favorite interactions came with Toby and a local, who was accompanied by his 4-month-old border collie pup. The border collie was named Bodhi (short for Bodhisattva, the local mentioned), and his papa was using a clicker and treats as reinforcement for positive behaviors. The local made it a point to seek out Toby, who was quite clearly a young pup at heart though his dog-body had aged to 6 months, and wanted them to play together. The idea was that young Bodhi could play with Toby, and the local would use the clicker/treat combination to reinforce Bodhi for interacting positively with Toby.

It was quite a sight seeing Bodhi, Toby, and later, a 1-year-old pup, playing together, running, juking, tackling, and nipping. The local was ecstatic for the interactions happening between the pups, using the clicker frequently and holding/feeding treats to Bodhi. The local said that regardless of how much effort one takes to playing with your dog, taking him out for walks, learning to play fetch, etc., that there is nothing quite like the energy spent between young dogs interacting successfully.

And I’m happy to say that I’ve got that human form of puppy exhaustion.

School has been out for about a week and a half. It was a trying and difficult year; many of doctoral students in the program say that second year is by far the most difficult year. I think it is ‘cause we’re balancing so many demands: personally, I had classes, research, practicum, and my position as a research assistant on a separate grant. Many times this year I felt stretched thin, feeling fortunate to not snap or suffer some sort of existential crisis or nervous breakdown. And I’m grateful that the year is over.

But with the end of the school year, things did not slow down.

I spent my first two days of break working at my research assistant position and painting fields for the ultimate tournament. I spent the previous weekend doing the volunteering thing, waking up at 6:30 and finishing the day around 11 or later. The next week focused on work, friends, some overdue phone calls, rocking trivia, enjoying sunshine, playing sports, going outdoor rock climbing for the first time, and hanging out with my future roommates. In short, it felt like each day was full of people and activities, and as a result of this, I’m feeling puppy exhausted.

And although I’m spending this Sunday mostly solitary (even then, I had breakfast with the cohort and watched around 5 hours of soccer), I’m grateful for all the activities and the time to recuperate. I’m not sure that the intensity and frequency of the interactions I had over the past week will sustain for the rest of the summer (late nights and alcohol, I forgot to mention, were also involved), but it’s a happier contrast for me than the beginning of last summer. I developed solid friendships and watched some great TV on Netflix… but that spark was missing. Summer is a time of misadventures and shenanigans, and they were not nearly present enough in the day-to-day last year. I’m hopeful that this summer will be a bit different; early indications are positive. 

Where you should all be on Sept 23rd

http://tickets.piersixpavilion.com/eventperformances.asp?evt=89

Highs and Lows: Starting with a blank book

I just spent over an hour getting sucked into this blog instead of doing the other things I meant to be doing. It is so wonderful to read what you are all thinking and finding interesting, and I wish that I had been more regularly involved with reading, commenting, and posting. I miss you all. I miss Colby less and less as I carve out places for myself elsewhere, but I still miss all of you lots.
__________________
Last you all heard from me here was that I was embarking on a crazy cross country trip with no real destination. Really observant/devoted TDT contributors may have noticed a post I started that has languished in the drafts section of this blog since December, unfinished. That trip started out so buoyant with excitement and promise that didn't even last me through the Rockies. It turns out that traveling alone--driving 6,300 miles in about a month--without a set plan, objective, or idea of where I was going, was really really really really hard. Had I thought about it more, that would have been an obvious conclusion, but I was so excited to get out of the rut I was feeling in Boston and NH and to go on this adventure that it never occurred to me to stop and say "why yes, Emma, of course driving across the country by yourself with minimal planning is going to get lonely, boring, and discouraging REALLY fast." That's not to say in any way that the trip was a total loss or that I didn't have any fun. 'Cause it wasn't, I did, and it was fantastic to see so many of my scattered friends along the way. I'm glad I went, and had I realized how hard it was going to be before I left, I may never have done it.

My last journal entry from that trip was written late at night on November 25th while curled up on Isaac's couch in Palo Alto, mind whirring and stressing and definitely not sleeping. It was less than a week before I got the call from Snowmass that they wanted to interview me; I was hired and off to Oregon and then to my new job by December 1st. But that night, watching headlights sweep across the darkened living room, I didn't know that yet. That journal entry is full of pain and confusion. I was so lost and alone. Yes, I could find myself on a map, and throwing things at Isaac down the hall would have given me a (sleepy, slightly grumpy, but awake) companion, but my loss and loneliness was on a different scale. It's a sloppy (I can barely read my own handwriting) rant about my previous years' failed relationships, lack of community, lack of purpose, inability to get the type of job I wanted or figure out where I wanted to live/what I wanted to do, and uncertainty about what I was doing and who I wanted to be. I ended by saying "basically, I'm not happy, don't know what I need to do to become happy, and should probably stop whining to myself and go to sleep."

This past six months have been a study in figuring out what makes me happy, becoming stronger and more stable, and not writing in my journal almost at all. I've realized that when I'm busy and happy, I don't write. For me, writing is a way to channel stress and uncertainty, to process and reflect what's going on around me. That's not to say that I don't enjoy writing--I do, very much so, but the moments that bring pen to paper are the ones where I am lost, confused, lonely, and have too much time on my hands to ponder. As you may imagine, this means that my journal is usually a dark and depressing story. In fact, when I unpacked it from the box of books that came home with me from Colorado this spring, the last thing written there was the command to myself to go to sleep. I ended up sitting there and reading the journal, which starts in May 2011 and goes until November 2011, cover to cover and deciding that, despite the clump of blank pages still left at the end of it, it was time to start over, to start fresh. I wrote a brief concluding entry: basically, that I moved to CO soon after the last entry was written, that I found a job that I love (for now), a place with friends, coworkers, and a boyfriend who are great, and that I am about to go back to the huts (which, of course, I love) in a new role and feel like a better, stronger, more stable version of myself. With that, I closed the journal and stuck it on the bookshelf of the room that I grew up in but barely live in anymore.

I have a new journal, sitting on my bed at 4,220 ft on Mt. Lafayette. In it, I've reflected on what it's been like to have a formal leadership role in my hut, made lists of things to talk about with my croo, realized just how much I miss my friends in Colorado and how quickly I made strong ties there, commented on the changing social dynamic of a hut system with 28 new croo members this year (as opposed to the usual 7-9 per year), and much more. To be honest, my journal still gets a bit whiny and ranty at times, but that's because writing is still the most effective tool I've found for processing things that I'm struggling with (second only to whining incessantly at anyone who'll listen, which is an absolutely terrible processing tool that I went cold turkey on at some point in middle school. Or maybe not cold turkey, but I significantly scaled back its usage.) Aside from the fact that I am now so much happier than I was then, the difference with this journal is a new tradition that I started with myself on a rainy day during huts training when everyone was playing a game that I couldn't play 'cause of a partially torn MCL and recent tonsillectomy: as part of each entry, I add a highlights section. Sometimes, the highlights are simple, short comments ("going out to sunset rocks with Nick before dinner" or "Johannes' bacon tree joke is really terrible"), but there are other times when writing the highlights of my day leads me to explain it more, and then to elaborate on it and think more about what made the specific moment or exchange so special.


By forcing myself to write about highlights, I have found myself appreciating and processing the positives in life as much as I do the negatives. Yes, things that we struggle with demand our attention and focus, but all too often they monopolize our attentions, making it so much harder to give the same priority to the things that make us happy. As you all know, I've always been an optimist, a silver linings type of person. Recognizing the highlights as well as the lowlights has helped me to bring that optimism inside my own head in an much more intentional and focused way. In lives as busy as chaotic as ours, taking a few minutes to reflect on the positives in our lives is so rewarding and can teach us so much about ourselves and what makes--and keeps--us happy. So give it a try, whether it be here in a plink or a post, in a secret word document on your computer, or in fountain pen in a handmade journal: set aside time to reflect on the positives. You never know where it might take you. 


Love and miss you all. Come visit me in NH this summer or CO starting this fall. My couch/floor are always yours.

A little anger is a good thing.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-simon-20120525,0,3547147,full.story

David Simon urges Georgetown graduates to struggle, in the face of absurdity, to make the world a better place

The greatest commencement address ever is now more than three decades old. And it's safe to say it will never be surpassed or even equaled. It belongs to the ages.

In 1979, its author summed up the condition of modern man by noting that, quote, more than at any other time in history, humanity is at the crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness; the other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. Unquote.

Bang. That's all she wrote. With that one paragraph, Woody Allen, filmmaker and philosopher-king, made Graduation Day his bitch for all time. No point in any of us trying to bring anything new to this game; Woody has killed it dead. That he never actually gave the remark at any commencement is beside the point. True, it appeared only as a column in The New York Times, but so what? Linked as it is to no actual college or university, Allen's address is now the preserve of graduates everywhere. It was mine when I slipped the surly bonds of the University in Maryland in 1983, and it belongs to you all now, here today. And if this forlorn little planet is still spinning when your children roll up and smoke their diplomas a couple short decades from now, it'll be theirs as well.

Now, I can hear you out there muttering. What's so great about Woody Allen's words? What is there to admire, save for a nice one-liner, delivered with all the pitch-perfect, neurotic self-doubt that Allen made famous?

Well, for thing, it is a funny line. And marching out into this beleaguered world of ours — you suckers are gonna need all the laughter you can get. Take solace in humor, people. As much as you can.

But more importantly, Allen was entirely, exactly and permanently right. He was right 30 years ago. And he's right at this very moment. And if we're lucky — if the odds don't catch up with us and the human race continues to stagger forward into fresh decades of a new century — then he'll be right 30 years from now.

We do indeed live at the brink of extinction — nuclear, or ecological, or epidemiological. Technology and Malthusian population scenarios — tethered as they are to man's innate potential for inhumanity — all of this may indeed be conspiring at this very moment to bring about a sudden apocalypse. That's true now, and it's going to stay true for all of the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, if we are lucky, we will endure and fight on, never vanquishing any of the fundamental threats to society but never capitulating either. Our problems will remain our problems, our solutions will always be incomplete. War will come again, famine too, and for every half-step forward, for every careful and reasoned moment of maturation in the human condition, there will be another moment in which greed or brutality prevails.

Okay, now you're starting to get a little restless. You're out there under those mortarboards, trying to enjoy this day. You did the work, you got the grades. Your parents are out there with you, prouder than hell. This is your day. And theirs. And who the hell is this lumpy white guy to come here and drip doom and despair all over the lawn in front of the Healy building? For the love of God, he's sucking the life out of the big moment.

Well, OK. Maybe so.

But the thing of it is, 30 years ago, when I sat where you now sit, my generation made the mistake of reading Woody Allen's words as a function of wit only. We got the joke. We were in on the joke. But we were pretty sure that it was, after all, only a joke.

After all, 30 years ago, the darkest days of the civil rights struggle were behind us, or so it seemed. Race relations were improving. Our nation seemed to be moving closer to a just and inclusive society. And, too, our country seemed to have learned some painful and tragic lessons about America and the limitations of overseas interventions. The Cold War was ongoing, true, but two decades removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was becoming increasingly clear to most sensate observers that the Soviet Union was even more overextended than we were, that for our Vietnams, they had their Afghanistans. The stalemate was just that, and with détente, there was a growing sense of thaw.

Economically, the American middle class remained ascendant. In the post-World War II years, industrialization and collective bargaining had created the greatest consumer class the world had ever seen — once-poor laborers were working jobs with union scale and benefits. Many became homeowners and middle class, pushing their children toward college and something more then they had. Income was often rightly called discretionary, and worker wages were used to power the greatest economy in world history. We sold each other not just the things we needed but the things we didn't need. We were the fuel for our own unrelenting economic engine.

With all that going for us, how could it not get better? How could tomorrow be anything but more than today?

When I sat where you now sit, I simply assumed that my generation couldn't help but seize the reins and deliver a great society. And later, when the Berlin Wall fell — when Cold War ideology no longer dictated American behavior around the globe, when our worst ideological fears were at last overcome — my, didn't the future seem bright indeed for a moment or two.

Well, here we are. And here you are.

And every day, it seems, the headlines offer fresh examples of the greed and selfishness with which my generation has laid waste to its own possibilities. And it doesn't end with Wall Street's kleptocracy. In the world at large, we have proclaimed ourselves to be a peace-loving nation, yet we wage prolonged wars of choice. We declare our devotion to free and open markets, yet time and again unrestrained capitalism, while an effective tool for generating short-term profit, proves itself a useless metric for calibrating a just and inclusive society. We insist that we are still a great people, that an American Century is still to come, yet many of us feel no call to citizenship if citizenship has any actual cost. Even during wartime, with our armies afield, we whine about paying taxes, though our tax rates are the lowest in modern American history. Meanwhile, though less prone to overt racism, we have nonetheless abandoned the precepts of upward mobility for all Americans, conceding the very idea of public education, of equality of opportunity. And as our society further stratifies, as the rich get richer and the poor become less and less necessary to our de-industrialized economy, we wage a war against our underclass under the guise of drug prohibition, turning America into the jailingest society on the face of the earth. And as to reform? As to the political leadership and responsive government? That hardly seems possible when our high court permits capital to purchase our electoral process at wholesale prices.

Am I'm bringing you down with all of this stuff? Am I bumming you out? I can't help it. I'm sorry. But hey, if you watched "The Wire," or "Generation Kill," or "Treme" — then you knew I was gonna go there, right? Those are angry narratives. They are saying angry things about the American future.

And now, forgive me, that future is yours. And Woody Allen's clever turn of phrase, once played for laughs, now has a real and ugly echo, doesn't it?

For starters, my generation probably owes yours an apology. Because, hey, we definitely shanked it. We choked. We let ourselves get distracted with greed, with gloss, with the taste of the bread and the glitz of the circuses. We took our eyes off the prize — which was always this:

There cannot be two American experiments, one for the fortunate and another for the rest. All of us must share the same future — like it or not. For the republic to long endure, there must be a real American collective, and all of us must have some stake in that collective.

For you, emerging now from this university, the question is what you will stand for, what you will assert for. Your America, as viable and verdant as this beautiful campus? Or the other America, the one that got left behind? Will you argue for your future? Or a collective future? Your tribe? Or an America that isn't tribal, that truly carries all of us forward, as a society? Are you for yourself? To a certain extent, we all must begin by being for ourselves. But if we are only for ourselves, or only for our families, or our friends, or our own class or interests — if empathy never reaches beyond our own backyard — then who the hell are we, really?

Right is right and wrong is wrong, and you all don't need those diplomas to know the difference. Will the right choice make it easier? Of course not. Will the right choice vindicate us? Doubtful.

Albert Camus, a great humanist and existentialist voice, pointed out that to commit to a just cause with no hope of success is absurd. But then, he also noted that not committing to a just cause is equally absurd. But only one choice offers the possibility for dignity. And dignity matters. Dignity matters.

Stripped of all platitude and illusion, Camus was saying we still have to fight. So for God's sake, fight. And get angry if you need to get angry. A little anger is a good thing if it isn't on your own behalf, if it's for others deserving of your anger, your empathy. And if you see the wrong around you getting bigger and uglier, then speak up, and call that wrong by its true name. Learn to refuse, to dissent. And in demanding something more from yourself and from your society, you may be surprised to find that you are not entirely alone. That other voices are saying the same things, that others want the same things.

It's been said that no man is a hero to a newspaperman, and I spent too many years as an ink-stained wretch. So, yeah, I have few intact heroes left. Fact is, I'm down to I.F. Stone, Curtis Mayfield and Woody Guthrie — and sometimes, I'm not even all that sure about Woody Guthrie. Admittedly, we would all do better with a few less heroes and villains and a few more ideas in our dialectic.

But I.F. Stone was a great dissenting voice in this country and one of the people who made me want to be a journalist — and he echoed Camus. He said that sometimes the only fights worth having are the ones that you know you are going to lose.

I know how that sounds. I know that it seems morose and futile, that it scarcely seems appropriate on a day like this, a day so ripe with human possibility. But it does make sense. Trust me. And if you bring the fight you need to bring, if you walk that road, it will make more sense with every mile.

Congratulations to all of you today. This moment matters deeply to you, to your parents, to your classmates, to your teachers. And that's more than enough dignity for one day. But tomorrow's task is to make this moment matter to your communities, to your country, to the world. And to make sure that at the end of your run, you leave that world better than you found it.

Thank you for having me.

My Year in a Text Message

(page 1/2)
heyo! welcome to TDT's year-in-review txt msg style! leave
a life-lesson, a funny time, or sthg in between, in less than
180 characters. feel free to toss out whatever comes to you,
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and enjoy/comment on all others who have done the same!
so don't be that guy; tap that freakin die, and leave a plink
(or two)!

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