Apologies...

Stuff that happened in the last five years

I quit my cushy EE job for a position that paid me a third of what I used to make. I'm thankful that this time around in school, instead of my paying the school, the school was paying me, even if it was barely enough to cover rent + food. I got an adorable kitten named Timmy, who woke me at 5:30am every day to feed him, and stayed up late nights with me while I crammed for physiology and anatomy. Within five years, I got a few raises (well, monstly adjustments for cost of living), and my kitty died. Money went and came. Kitty came and went. Is it now all the same?

I thought I wanted to study tissue engineering, but professors in tissue engineering did not agree with this idea. My academic advisor thought I wanted to study imaging, but I didn't agree with this idea. Especially when the electrical impedance tomography professor was only tolerable when he was on Prozac. Then, out of the blue, I took a turn toward neuroscience, and joined forces with a 40+ year old post doc and a 65+ year old "nutty professor" (or looked that way from googled images) to work on a retina prosthetic. Digital circuits go "101101100100010100111" and ganglion cells go "spike spike ....spike spike spike spike.... spike... spike... spike... spike spike spike spike spike" and I found my home, my shelter in the furious "you must find your thesis topic NOW" storm that would have eaten me alive. Which my advisor was skeptical about, and my qualifying exam committee members almost did not agree with, and by sheer divine intervention, I was not dislodged from this makeshift shelter. In fact, I found my home with the outcasts of the retinal neurons: amacrine cells. Those poor axonless cells... the violas of the retinal string orchestra...they have so much character, if only neuroscientists listened more carefully to their graded potential chatter! Turns out, they have their own voices, and some even have axons, and in my mind, these misfit amacrine cells have been saying a lot more than researchers have been giving them credit for. Now, they will have a permanent home in my dissertation as the centerpiece of inner retina processing. It's the least I could do, since they provided me a shelter in my graduate research topic storm.

Five years ago, I was the "secret" girlfriend of WY. Many fights later, I was his fiancee, and many many many fights later, I became his wife (clearly, not fights with him, but with external forces of massive inertia). In the course of these five years, I moved four times, and finally found my home with WY in the Island City. Our living space first looked like a refugee camp as my possessions and his clashed for the first time. It promptly became a home, with a proper living room and dining room, but has now reverted back to college-student-apartment state: mostly workspace with large desks, shelves, books, papers everywhere. And now that I have moved out of my lab, it is starting to look like a refugee camp again, with boxes full of miscellaneous items here and there.

Five years ago, I was optimistic about graduate school, and embarassingly naive. Then I became skeptical about bioengineering research. During that time, I also lost faith in family members, whom I thought loved me. Bitterness and negativity reigned in full until March 29, 2006, when I survived a trial by fire and was introduced to "the other side": restored faith in my family, and validation as a junior graduate researcher. However, that optimistic, naive graduate student never returned. In her place, is a much more critical skeptic, unable to feel the excitement of new discovery because it would likely have its little life squelched out of it in the manuscript review process. Unfortunately, this critical skeptic began its poisonous work not just in lab, but in social dealings and relationships. It took the combined efforts of my advisor and my husband to knock me back into shape, and I now can allow myself to feel excited about new discoveries and restore my faith in people again! How wonderful to be able to feel POSITIVELY about something and someone!

Now, I sit at this very moment in time, just at the bitty tailend of one phase, and on the brink of tumbling into the next. In the next five years, what will happen? Who knows?! Regardless of not knowing the details, I fully expect that these five years will be a whirlwind, blowing many things my way, and wrenching other things out of my hands. And life stumbles forward.

Summer Slithers Speedily

This has been an odd summer, and somehow, I have managed to lose my sense of time. At first, I couldn't tell what day it was... "Is it Thursday? Why does it feel like Friday?"... and then I lost track of what month it was. People would say, "I'm looking to buy a house in the fall" and for some reason, I would think that was on the order of 10+ months away, when it is just ... uh... 2-3 months away. That computation just now took me 10 seconds, and even now, I barely realize that it is almost mid-July (right?!). I'm also a little mixed up on the year we're in. I feel like we are in 2006, or 2007, but we're really in 2008. Oddly enough, even though I have no idea "when" I am, I have the acute sense that it is going by very very very FAST. Every single day passes by quickly, and the end of every week springs a surprise on me. It's weird, because time is both going by quickly and slowly. Slowly because based on how each day feels, by my skewed count we should be in September, but we are actually in July. For instance, we had our family roadtrip at the end of May/early July, which was just about 6 weeks ago, but feels more like 12 weeks ago. It's a very strange sensation to be so off-kilter in the temporal sense. Maybe it's because many things have happened in the last 6 weeks, so it feels like a great deal of time has elapsed, but it's not that there was a lot of time, but a lot of stuff. Lots of stuff like....weddings, deaths, engagements, home purchases, births, graduations, out-of-town visitors, manuscript turnaround, arrivals of new people, camping trips... and it probably doesn't help that when I'm not doing all these things, I'm holed up somewhere between lab and home writing/analyzing data/procrastinating. It's all going by so fast. My time in lab is numbered by days, and my start date at the new job is fast approaching. Sandwiched in there is thesis-writing (gotta get that committee on-board!), MVP down in Garden Grove, two-year wedding anniversary (wowsers that was fast), and brothers coming into town too.

Time waits for no one, least of all procrastinating graduate students...

And, to close with a major rave... if you must know statistics for hypothesis testing, and don't feel like mucking through the mire of statistical theory, get Stanton Glantz's "Primer of Biostatistics" (6th ed). This book is well-written, funny to read, and it's pretty easy to get to the formulas and tables you need to compute whatever number you want. My copy is totally battered from my clinging to it as I write my paper/thesis. And, if you have the good fortune to be able to take classes at UCSF, you simply MUST take Dr Glantz's class. He is, hands down, the best instructor I've had in graduate school, if not the best teacher in both undergrad and grad.

pictures pictures

As a reversal of what is usually the case, instead of updating my blog (since there is only so much writing one can do at a time), Will has posted tons of pictures. Graduation pictures, roadtrip pictures... so until I finish this thesis and resume my regular blogging habits, here are some pictures:

gallery.mac.com/will.yang

please be patient, since the webpage loads rather slowly. not sure why.

nearing the end

I'm back on campus after graduation festivities. It was the best graduation I have ever had (well, best of 3) for a few reasons. My whole family (and then some) was there. Mom, Dad, sister, brothers, and even a cousin all came, dishing out the big bucks for plane tickets over Memorial Day weekend. Then, to my utter surprise, friends from L.A. drove up with their young child just to attend my graduation. Finally, we didn't stay for the whole thing, because they hooded us near the beginning of the commencement, before the long list of undergrads. Despite the rain and cold, and despite their mispronouncing my name (due to my apparently ambiguous phonetic spelling), it was the best graduation day ever.

But now, here I am, near the end, and now I turn around and look back. The campus is quiet these days, since all the graduation ceremonies are over, and most of the undergraduates are off on summer break. How many of these quiet summers have I spent here? Five in graduate school, and one as an undergraduate. When I left Berkeley after I finished my last final exam as an undergrad, I remember looking back at the Hearst Women's gym (where I took the exam) and thought, I'll never be back here again as a student. Three years later, I proved myself wrong. Now, five years after that, I'm saying it again: I'll never be back here as a student. No more quiet walks in the morning or late afternoon, no more Yali's... and quite possibly, no more experiments EVER. I'm trading this academic scene for a corporate one, and as I am on the brink of making this transition, I get this nagging sense that I am leaving my heart in science and engineering. I don't know that I'll ever fit in the lawyer crowd. I have grown to appreciate the brutal honesty of experiments, and it's possible that this honesty will be rarely encountered in a more corporate setting. Who knows where this next path will lead.

While I don't know where I'm going with the next job, I would be shocked out of my socks if I end up enrolling back at Berkeley in law or business school. Now that would be outrageous!