Our friend Francois, a professor at NCSU told us that if Kelly got a degree in Statistics then went on to something in the Humanities or Business, she would be the “queen of the department” wherever she went. We thought that was pretty cool at the time, but had not thought about it much since then. Kelly got accepted into a great PhD program and then struggled. On average, everyone else in the program was eight years older than her, the youngest being three years older than her when they started. Almost all of them had an MBA and three to five years of experience before they entered the PhD program. There were a couple who went straight from their undergraduate degree to the PhD program, but had a fairly extensive undergraduate research experience. Kelly, on the other hand, was literally, just two years out of high school, or at least that was how old she was when she started.
She has struggled because she was in the habit of taking hard classes that would help her in her understanding of Statistics and not the general Business leveling classes. She has done great in her TA’ing duties and her classes. She knew (knows) how to deal with hard technical material and with people. She started slowly on her RA’ing tasks, but know that she knows what is expected, she excels. The challenge was the research. She had no background at all in formal, technical research. She has struggled. She has her first formal, publication quality paper due in the second week of February. Her work habits were really pretty good by the end of her undergraduate degree at NCSU, but no where near the level she needed to operate at the PhD level. She has hammered away at it though, and today she is performing at a higher level than she ever might have thought she was capable.
So the payback is that her roommate who is in precisely the same program as Kelly, but seven years older with a PhD professor (Dean, actually) father, is coming to Kelly for help on the truly hard stuff. It is a sweet thing, when you have done the truly hard stuff, to enjoy the benefits and security of having it behind you. Congratulations to Kelly. You can not beat a hard STEM degree, no matter what you go on to do after.
Betty Blonde #470 – 04/29/2010
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Lorena just came back from Seattle. She was up there for about five days to help Kelly because she has time for nothing but studying. In her PhD program she has to do two formal papers in addition to her dissertation. They are full-blown research projects with experiments and formal write-ups good enough they are often published in scholarly journals. Since first year students generally have never done such formal research, they have to learn everything from scratch. That was certainly true for Kelly. Kelly’s presentation of her first year paper takes place the second week of February and she is working every waking hour on the paper, her TA responsibilities, research for her advisor and the classes she has to take.
I am at that awkward age when medical professionals begin to be persistent in their admonishments for a fairly wide variety of uncomfortable poking and prodding. Day before yesterday I took some pills and drank a very large amount of liquids and powders to clean things out so I would be ready for a colonoscopy yesterday. It was scheduled for the morning and I thought I was going to be able to go back to work in the afternoon. A colleague at work disabused me of the notion of returning to work, so I to the whole day off. I was glad I did.
We finished the old year well watching Pink Martini at the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall in Portland, then ran over to a party of old friends in Yamhill. We will do it again sometime. It might be a bit of a cliché, but I think the New Year is a great time to make resolutions. Even with diets, I have made great progress after starting on New Year’s Day. I have three more days until I go back to work and my plan is to reflect on what I want to do next year. Right now though, we are going to continue to start the New Year right by going to the Burger Hut in Hubbard for breakfast. Happy New Year!
Rejecting a comment
By Dad
On Wednesday, January 20, 2016
In Blogging
I rarely have cause to reject comments on this blog for anything other than span which Askimet pretty much handles on its own. Our content is not really very controversial in the whole scheme of things so inappropriate comments are not too much of a problem. I got a comment today that was aggressive and snarky with claims about qualifications that were impossible (and not worth the time) to check. The author of the comment took objection to something I said about getting a STEM degree (I think it was about this post) that completely missed the point of the post in a very snarky and unhelpful way. I enjoy a vigorous discussion and have been known to admit I am wrong and try to change my ways, but the purpose of this blog is to discuss topics of interest to me and my readership in a thoughtful and even vigorous and argumentative way. Anything that detracts from that needs to be rejected.
I was helped in this by a comment Tom Gilson made over at the Thinking Christian blog on how he manages his blog comments. He basically says any comments helpful to the mission of the blog that meet certain rules of decorum are OK. I will base my comment moderation on that model.
Betty Blonde #466 – 04/23/2010
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