some new results

There is a very good reason why I have not been updating my blog.  Well, sort of.  As you, my faithful readers, are likely aware, my life has been very much in the balance for the past few months.  So many things happened, or almost happened, and then everything very suddenly magically worked out.

Here's the scoop.  I applied for a postdoctoral research grant from the National Science Foundation back in early November.  It was extremely last minute.  Maddeningly so.  I learned about the grant something like a week before the proposal was due.  Thankfully two things had happened: I was already in the process of preparing a different grant proposal, so it wasn't too terribly hard to rewrite that one into a different version for NSF, and the government shutdown had backed things up at NSF so much that they ended up extending the deadline by a week or two, giving me a little extra time.

In any case, it was kind of miserable pulling everything together at the last minute, but I did it, and then I sat.  And waited.  For months.  At the end of January, I learned that my proposal had been sent out for review, which means they sent it to some experts in my field to read what I had written and make comments on it for the big committee meeting.  Then in early March, the committee met, and we heard nothing.  Radio silence.  And then - suddenly - in May, after months of no communication whatsoever from NSF, the status of my proposal magically changed from "pending" to "recommended".

What that means is this: the way NSF works is a big committee meets to discuss all the proposals that have been submitted.  The committee members read the proposals themselves, and also the reviews written by the expert reviewers, and the program manager (the head of the committee) has to write up a summary of all of the discussions, and ultimately make a recommendation for which grants should be funded.   Normally, when the program manager recommends that a grant be funded, it's funded.  So for my grant status to change from "pending" to "recommended" is huge.  The problem was, there has been discussion of a bill in congress called the FIRST act, which is the reauthorization for the NSF budget, and it's kind of a mess, from what I understand.  They're trying to slash science funding, and they're also trying to implement some really damaging changes to the scientific review process.  It's extremely disheartening, to say the least.

So in my case, there was the added issue of the timing of this legislation.  I was really worried that even though my grant was recommended, depending on what was happening with the FIRST act, the program manager's recommendation might get shot down.  And then I would be in the somewhat tragic position of being the only person anyone's ever heard of who had their grant get recommended and then not funded.

But.  But!  On June 1st, the status changed again: from "recommended" to "funded".  That's it - "funded".  And suddenly there's paperwork to fill out and plane tickets that I can buy on my very own grant and my salary is getting changed over to my very own grant as of July 1st.

So all of this time that I have been not blogging, I've been in kind of a precarious mind space, wondering where I would be next year.  Hoping against hope that things would work out with this grant, and wanting to write an update here, but holding my breath because what if, what if it doesn't work out.  In the meantime, I also had a job interview elsewhere (sort of... that's a subject for a different post), and also spent some time convincing myself that truly, the absolute worst case scenario would be for me to move back to Berkeley for a year, and come on, that's not exactly the end of the world.

But here I am, and it's summer in State College, and the weather has been truly lovely and I get to sit in my upstairs office in my apartment that I love, and work on things that I think are interesting, and go for long runs on Sunday mornings, and spend the day on Saturday brewing beer and pulling weeds in the garden plot I'm sharing with my neighbors.  Things have gotten so cozy here.  I'm really feeling at home, and at least part of that is because I now know I can stay here, so I can afford to get attached to it.  I have some really great friends who live in the same apartment complex as me, and some nights we sit out on the porch together, or in the grass behind our houses, munching on snacks and shooting the breeze.  It's a good life, and I'm glad I get to live it for a little while longer.

This summer is about to become a little bit crazy, though, so I'm trying to enjoy the lazy days of summer while I can.  J will be here starting Tuesday (yay!!), and we will have a month of hanging out and probably alternately working from home and going out and exploring the environs.  Then the craziness starts.  I'll be in Geneva for a week (yes, just one week) in July, for a conference.  Then I stop off in PA, do my laundry, and head back out to California almost immediately, where J and I are driving up north (basically on the border with Oregon) for his family reunion.  I'll be back here at the beginning of August, and then I guess it's time for the semester, and it'll be time to start keeping my eyes peeled for faculty jobs.

And that is the story of what I've been up to for the past few months.  Oh, also, I went to my Berkeley graduation and G & S's wedding in May, and it was really wonderful.  I hope they don't mind if I post a picture here.  (It's on the internet elsewhere, so I don't think it should matter.)

I think this is G's 1052nd picture of the day.  I assure you he was quite happy in person.

Tonight I think I'm going to Happy Valley Brewing Company to watch the World Cup, and tomorrow is long run day, and I also have some laundry to do and more weeds to pull.  (Gardening is hard work.  Especially when you only do it in extremely punctuated spurts.  :-P )  I will try to make my next update not take quite so long as this one did (although no promises that I will be able to top the NSF news).

Happy Summer!

Dissertation, Part 2 (subtitle: "It Never Actually Ends")

I am so very close to submitting the first paper from my dissertation work.  It is really shaping up, and I'm getting kind of proud of it.  The end game is very weird, though, because the longer you work on something while feeling like it's almost done, the more it starts to feel like you will never actually be done.  It's like the end of a race, when you can see the stupid finish line, and yet no matter how hard you run, it always stays in the distance.  I have watched this paper go from about 10 pages of partial analyses just a few weeks ago to a whopping 46 pages of hard-fought argumentation, as of today, and I've still got a few more to go before I can really put the nail in the coffin.  It just keeps expanding, though!  The only thing I have left to finish up is the general discussion, at the very end, and I have notes for what I want to say, and all of the papers I think I need to cite.  So in a way, it looks SO CLOSE to being done.  And yet, I look at that (relatively short) list of papers I still need to discuss, and then I realize how much more reading I need to do before I can discuss them, because every "mention so-and-so here" note means I need to re-read 15 - 30 pages of someone else's work and think about how exactly it relates to what I'm doing before I can write that section.  And then I end up with a few more paragraphs that are hopefully good, and fair, and well written, but every single one of those takes at least 30 - 45 minutes, and sometimes several hours.

And this is still my dissertation work!  You know, the stuff I "finished" six months ago!  I guess I knew it would be like this - that it's always like this... that this is the career I signed up for, after all - but I am continually amazed at just how long everything takes.  I've been working on this project regularly, in earnest, for about a year now, and I'm just now getting to the point where it's close to being submitted to a journal.  I think it has a good chance of being accepted somewhere decent, which is exciting, but it gets kind of daunting thinking about how many times I'm going to have to go through this very process!  Of course, I can partially console myself with the knowledge that I will presumably get better at this sort of thing as I go, that this may be the hardest paper I ever prepare for publication, since it's my first one and all, but it is kind of daunting thinking about just how much time a project can take, and thinking about finding a way of accomplishing that once I have other significant drains on my time, like teaching, and faculty meetings, and advising students, and writing grants...

So... let's just assume that the paper writing, at least, is going to get easier as I go.  It helps to realize that I haven't been at this very long at all, in the scheme of things, and that all of the researchers I admire have been working on this one tiny little piece of the puzzle that we're all working on for years now, and I just really got started a year ago.  In five or ten or twenty years, I might not have to spend quite so long looking up papers and assimilating new information.  I hope!

Okay, back to work now.  I'm trying to submit this thing by the end of next week, and I think I can do it!

checkmark for Friday!

I'm done!  I just submitted my first research grant!!!!!!

I'm done!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't even care if I get the stupid thing at this point.  I'm just glad I don't have to think about it and re-write things anymore.  And now I am totally going for a run.

well would you look at that, Part II

Pssssst.  I think something may actually have happened in my dissertation experiment.  Maybe not - it's too early to tell - but I made some graphs today, and it looks like something interesting might be going on.

I'm whispering because I am not getting my hopes up yet.  Instead, I am going to go back to labeling sound files so that I have more data.  And then I will come back and try again for real sometime next week.

In other good news, my grant proposal is also trucking along.  I did the biosketch (including the personal statement, grumble grumble... what am I, applying to college or something?) and I finished up the project summary today.  Progress, progress!  And a Skype meeting with my sponsor tomorrow, who will hopefully have nice and helpful things to say, and then I'm headed down to Stanford to see a very dear friend defend her dissertation tomorrow afternoon.

Go go go!

oh the blog

Oh right.  I'm supposed to say stuff on here.

It's 2013!  And the past few days have been about 65 degrees and sunny (it is my experience thus far that January in Berkeley is considerably nicer than July in Berkeley), so I've been throwing the windows open during the day and trying to spend a decent amount of time outside.  I just got back from a really, really nice walk around town.  Well, back up.  First I accidentally spent the whole morning working.  I've started on a new project, and it's actually kind of fun, so the past few days I've been sinking several hours a day into coding.  On Friday evening, I thought, "Hey, I'll just write the first part of that script real quick," and then of course several hours slipped through my fingers... I'm not really getting any better at programming, probably largely because I only attempt it every few months, so every time I try to write a little program, I have to re-learn everything I've forgotten.  I am learning to think like a programmer a little better, though; when I approach a project now, I at least feel like I know where to start, and what the logic of the program should be.  It's the implementation (and the debugging!) that takes so darn long.

Anyway, I spent a few hours getting the outline of my script in place on Friday night.  And then I spent a few more hours yesterday getting it mostly working.  And then I spent all morning today tweaking and making it do exactly what I want it to do.  And now it's pretty much done!  It's totally done, actually.  I'm going to have to tweak little bits of it as I move ahead and decide I want to look at this or that little thing, but all of the machinery is in place and it's 100% working, so now I can just go in and change the little bits that will let me look at different stuff.  (I'm looking at word durations and sound durations in several dozen hours of transcribed spontaneous speech, so I had to write a program that will go in and find the particular words I want to look at and return the information I need.  So now I can find whatever words I want - I just have to narrow down which types of words I want to include in my analysis.)

After I finished writing my program to my satisfaction, it was suddenly 1:30 and I was still in my pajamas.  So I took a shower and then didn't know what to do with myself, and I decided to go for a long walk around Berkeley.  I was gone a little over an hour and a half - I went up through North Berkeley and down through the Gourmet Ghetto, stopped at Philz Coffee and paid too much for a cup of coffee and a cookie (because that's what you do at Philz), headed through downtown, and then looped back up to my house.  And it's still sunny and 65 degrees, and I'm so glad I got out to enjoy it for a bit.

I guess I should also write an update on the rest of January.  My talk at the LSA went quite well!  When it was over, I thought, "Well hey, that was pretty all right," and I think if you get to the end of a conference talk and you feel that way, that probably means you did about as well as you could have.  (Maybe someday I'll get to the end of a talk and think, "Yeah!  Rocked it!", but I'm not holding my breath.)

Now that the LSA is over, it's time to get back to thinking about my dissertation.  I'm going back to try testing more kids on Tuesday (after a much needed reprieve), so I'm feeling a bit anxious about that.  You may recall that my dissertation experiment has yet to really work.  So I've been re-thinking things, and I've decided to accept the fact that I can't do everything I wanted and scale my experiment back.  The upside is that the experiment itself keeps getting simpler and more doable.  The downside is that I can't really write a dissertation on it anymore, because it's a somewhat small project at this point.  So I've decided to supplement my experiment (assuming I eventually get it to work...) with a corpus study. (This is the new project I've been wading into the past few days.)  Now I'm coming at the same basic question from two completely different angles: an experiment with preschoolers, and a study of conversational speech produced by adults.  The trick will be weaving these into one cohesive narrative, but I think I can do it.  It's definitely changing the focus of the project as a whole, but I think it's the way to go.

So tomorrow will be spent in preparation for my day of testing on Tuesday.  Please cross your fingers for me that I'm able to finish getting things ready tomorrow, and that Tuesday goes smoothly.  It would be so great if I could get this thing to work.  (Serious understatement.  Bleargh.)

I also sense my plate already filling up for the next few months... I'm giving a workshop on the R statistical programming language (I never thought I'd see the day...) and I have to have a practice version ready in the next two weeks.  We're also having candidates visit for the phonetics job in our department, and as I'm part of the hiring committee, I'll be pretty busy meeting/entertaining/interviewing them over the next month or so.  And on top of that, I'm starting work on my NIH NRSA grant next week, as I need a working version done by mid-March.

Whew!

Life is busy, but quite good.  Or maybe that should read, "Life is busy, and quite good," because I always feel better about myself when I'm being productive.

That's it!  You're updated!

interlude: a list of things

- WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PAPERS TO READ?  It is truly never-ending.  I do realize that that is the point of the whole pursuit - generate discussion to generate more experiments to eventually generate better understanding - but it's just this rabbit hole of tightly interconnected ideas and hypotheses, and you can spend your whole life trying to figure out where to start, let alone jumping in and contributing something worthwhile to the discussion.  Is this so abstract that it's completely opaque?  Now that I've decided what type of experiments I'm running for my dissertation, I have to narrow down what exact questions I'm asking, and how to set up the experimental procedure so I make sure I'm actually getting data that answer those questions, and not some other, related questions that I didn't mean to ask. I'm doing some word learning studies, so now I'm sifting through papers on word learning, and it's all so interesting, but absolutely paralyzing.  There are so many gosh darn variables, and I'm still figuring out which ones to try to ask questions about, and which ones I absolutely need to control for.  (Word frequency: should I systematically manipulate the number of exposures the kids get to each word, or should I let them get as many exposures as they need to learn all the words?  Memory consolidation: should I test them the same day I teach them the words, and/or should I make them have a night's sleep in between?  Should I test them on multiple days?  What if I count on testing them on multiple days, and then they don't want to be tested a second time?  Recognition vs. production: should I incorporate a word recognition task into the training, or just focus on word production?  If I incorporate a word recognition task, should I manipulate the phonetic details of the words they're hearing, so I get a test of whether they've generalized the phonetic information, or is that too many variables?  etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum)

- On the bright side, I'm very excited about what I'm doing, and after I sift through a few more papers, I think I'll be ready to go...

- It's a beautiful day out, and I have enough of a cold that I feel justified staying at home for the day.  So I slept in today and am now sitting in my screened-in porch style apartment with all the windows open, drinking coffee and taking notes on papers.  It's fantastic, except that there are so many papers to read (see above), and I have to take breaks periodically, because it's a lot of concentrating.  Hence the blog entry.

- I got paid last week!  So I ordered a new phone for myself!  Both things are very exciting for me, due to their very low frequency of occurrence; now that I've switched back to my fellowship, instead of teaching, I only get paid 3 times a year.  And I just never buy a new phone, because I'm perfectly satisfied being a curmudgeonly luddite when it comes to phones.  I don't want access to email and the internet 24 hours a day...

- One of my friends started a linguist intramural softball team!  So I played softball twice last week, and we have our first game next week!  It's really really fun to be playing softball again, but I'm fairly certain our team is going to be horrible, and that's okay.  It's more about the experience.

Okay, back to work.

Grad School WIN

I have the greatest advisors ever.  I really, really do, and I don't have enough good things to say about them.

They actually told me, in as many words, "This is a great idea.  And if you start having doubts about what you're doing - and you will, because we all do - just come talk to us, and we'll tell you to knock it off and get back to work, because this is a great idea."

Do I really have to leave this place and go out in the big scary academic world where I don't have wonderful advisors to talk me down and reassure me that I'm doing okay? ... I think I do, but not for a little while yet.

running out of steam

I'm sitting in my beautiful apartment with all of the windows and the door open - it feels like I live on a screened-in porch when I do that, and I love it - and I am having a heck of a hard time forcing myself to work.  I am applying for a job at Penn State University which would probably start in January, and it has been incredibly stressful for many reasons.  Am I moving across the country in a few months?  Dunno.  Do I have to write an entire dissertation in 6 months?  Maybe.  Can I finish this dissertation chapter before I have to apply?  Definitely not, but I have to try anyway.  What in the hell is going on??  No idea.

So it turns out that getting divorced + the end of the semester + trying to write a dissertation chapter in two weeks + applying for a job = stomach ulcer, in case you were wondering.  I woke up with this awful searing pain in my stomach last Thursday, which went away after I ate some food, but it's been back periodically ever since then, and after doing some reading online, I'm pretty sure I have a stomach ulcer.  So that's interesting!  As long as I take some Pepto Bismol every once in a while, it's fine, but I'm anxious for my doctor's appointment to get here (it's on Tuesday) so I can get some antibiotics and nip this thing in the bud.  (Did you know that 70 - 90% of stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium that usually only gets a foothold when you have a compromised immune system due to stress?  I learned that this week!)

Anyway, things are mostly good, actually.  I've gotten a lot of work done in the past two weeks, and now I know exactly what my dissertation's going to be about, and I've even started writing it.  Crazy, right?  It's just that I'm in the home stretch of finishing up this chapter to send off with my application materials, and I have to finish up my 'statement of research interests', and I'm just... close enough to finishing that it's hard to motivate myself to just DO it, y'know?  I need to just do it.

Ok.  Self pep-talk over.  I'm gonna do it.  And then I'm gonna submit these things and wait to hear back about whether I have to write the rest of this thing and move to Pennsylvania in 6 months.  I have no idea what is going on, but I am excited and super anxious, in the good way and the bad way.

I leave you with some awesome pictures of my brain that I recently rediscovered.  I participated in a speech perception experiment at UCSF last fall, and they made MRIs of my brain, which I think are awesome and I'm going to frame them and put them in my office.

Look at that corpus callosum!  Look at that beautiful cerebellum!
And look at how huge the human tongue is!

Ghoooost faaace...  Ghooooost faaaaaaace...

Dissertation Mode: STALL

I am so anxious to sit down and actually work on this dissertation, but I have so much grading to do today and tomorrow.  Why can't this semester be over??  I thought it was over!  Jeeminee.

So I told myself I'm submitting an abstract to the conference I went to in Boston last year, because it was such a great conference and I'd love to go back, and plus they publish their proceedings, so it's a good way to get a little publication.  Anyway, that abstract is due Tuesday, and it's supposed to be based on preliminary findings for my dissertation, which are starting to trickle in a little bit here and there.  The problem is that I have to write a preliminary-preliminary version of that abstract to turn in for one of my classes - today - and I really wish I could just work on the dang project more to get some more data for the real abstract, which has to be submitted by Tuesday.  Oh well.  Maybe it will be nice to have a draft of the abstract so I can spend more time getting more data over the weekend...?

And then the week after that, I'm submitting an application for a dissertation research grant, which also relies on me getting this pilot study done, so I can say something realistic about what the rest of my dissertation is going to be about.  And then the week after that, I'm applying for a postdoctoral researcher position, which I'm super excited about but also freaking out a little bit, and that involves writing up my preliminary findings into a research paper I can submit with my application.

So yeah.  It would be nice to just be able to work on all of that stuff instead of staring down this mountain of syntax finals I have to grade.  And I'm going to Palo Alto (Stanford) this evening to hang out with my friend/collaborator and have a little research group meeting, and we have our departmental graduation tomorrow!  I love graduation, so it will be really nice to see all my friends get their PhD and MA hoods and all that, but I'm just feeling kind of antsy for the next few weeks!

We just hired a new professor in our department.  I like him very much, and it's a little weird, because he's only a few years older than me, and he's in the position I hope to be in myself in a year or two or three - young, newly hired professor at a prestigious university and all that.  Anyway, I was talking to him at his welcome party last week, and he passed on some advice from one of his former professors.  Apparently this guy asks undergrads who think they want to be linguistics professors, "How much do you love linguistics?  Do you love it enough to do it in your spare time?"  And the more I think about it, the more important of a question that seems.  If you really want to make it in this academic racket, you have to love sitting down with your data at 7:00 in the evening, when you're finally home for the day, and spending a few hours here or there puzzling over it whenever you have the free time.

I need a shower and some breakfast before I head to campus for the day.  Love to all, and I'll write again soon.

Dissertation Mode: GO

I'm done teaching for the semester!  The only things I have left for the semester proper are two mountains of grading (the last assignment and the final for the class I was teaching).  My fellow teaching assistant and I did a final review session for our students this afternoon, so now it's time to switch gears entirely.  That is, I now intend to hang up my syntactician shoes for good and turn all of my academic energy toward writing a chapter or two of my dissertation over the next few months.

To that end, I have several thousand instances of /s/ and /ʃ/ sounds to analyze in the next two weeks, which means I will be sitting in front of my computer looking at displays like this for several hours a day:

Yes indeedy.  Baby babble all day long.

Also to that end, I attended a dissertation writing workshop the week before last, and they gave us a nice packet of tips and encouragement for writing a thesis.  I read through it over the weekend, and I found this gem of a quote:

"When you are actually writing, and working as hard as you should be if you want to succeed, you will feel inadequate, stupid, and tired.  If you don't feel like that, then you aren't working hard enough."

Huzzah!  Let the fun begin!

This Summer

I have plans for this summer.  Most of them include bearing down and figuring out how exactly to go about writing at least one chapter of my dissertation.  I've been plugging away at a really awesome study that I'm very proud and excited about, and that my advisors tell me should be at least one chapter of my dissertation.  I don't have any results yet - I'm still collecting and processing data - but I should have results within the next month, and then this summer I will be figuring out how to write them up.  I have no idea how to write a dissertation.  I suppose that's what advisors are for...

Anyway, here are my other plans:

View Larger Map

Road.  Trip.  Massive, massive road trip, in which I pass through four of the remaining states I've never been to (Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota) and visit two national monuments (Yellowstone National Park and Mount Rushmore), and pass through a couple of cities that are supposed to be surprisingly cool (Boise, Fargo, Minneapolis, Madison, Chicago - although I've already been to the last two and know that I love them).  It is going to be epic, and I am really excited.

For now, though, I need to get back to work and read about how the vocal tract develops over the first few years of life.  Speech development is so cool, I'm telling you.  Anyway, I thought I'd been silent to the blogosphere for a while, so I figured it was time to send out a smoke signal.  I'm still here!  Just busy learning to program, reading papers, and teaching some undergrads.  Plugging away, as always...

Phoneticians Take Seattle

Jeez, what a week, and the fun is just starting!!

So I passed my qualifying exam last Tuesday.  Hurray!  (That means I get to write a dissertation now!  Hurray!)  I mean, I guess.  I'm excited about writing a dissertation, in some ways, I just don't know what exactly to write it about yet, so that's a little daunting.  This is partially what my qualifying exam and advisors are for, of course; I talked about my qualifying paper and the research articles I've been reading for about 3 hours on Tuesday, and then I got sent out of the room for about 3 minutes while my committee "deliberated", and then they called me back in and shook my hand and said "congratulations, you passed!" That was nice, and it feels *so* good to be done, but part of the point of the exam is to challenge me and ask me hard questions about why my work is important (or not), and of course I didn't have all the right answers, or even any answers at all in some cases.  The downside is that now I'm feeling kind of... less confident about my work after it's been picked apart by really smart people, and more than ever, I'm aware of all of the problems with it.  And yet I haven't figured out what to do next, as a follow-up, like as a dissertation.  So I'm in this weird in-between state of feeling like, "well, that wasn't quite right", but I don't know where to go next.

And now I'm in Seattle, by the way.  This week was so weird.  Qualifying exam on Tuesday, followed by brain mush and spacing out for about 24 hours, followed by reanalyzing data (again) and updating my conference poster for the particular conference I'm at this week.  Here's the new version, in case you're curious:

I don't know how much better it is, but it's a little different from the last one, anyway.

I left the house at 6:00 this morning, flew in to Seattle around 10:30, and took light rail into downtown, where I made my way to the Seattle Sheraton and promptly ran into my advisor in the hotel lobby.  "Well hey!  I didn't know you were gonna be here!"  Such a funny, fun surprise.  Then we had a little academic family pow-wow in the lobby, with my advisor and a bunch of his former students who are now new professors and a few people they know.  Then I got to meet some people whose papers I've read and whose names I've seen around, which is a weird experience that I'm still getting used to.  Like, "Oh!  You're Person X!  Of 'Person X and Person Y, Journal of Phonetics, 2008!'" or whatever.  Putting a face to a citation, in other words.

Sidenote: No one will care about this but other linguists, but on the light rail system, there's this disembodied woman's voice who announces the stops, and for every stop she says, "Now arriving, Stadium station.  Exits on my left."  Or something like that.  The weird thing was the "my left".  Disembodied voices are not supposed to use deictics that way.  I think the L in Chicago says "exit to your left", which is of course ambiguous because you could be facing any direction when the disembodied voice tells you that. So I see what they were going for, with the "my", but I've just never heard a mass transit system speak in the first person before.

Anyway, then I bummed around the conference for a few hours, met people, talked about experiments, and then started to get tired.  So I called my friend Beth who used to work at the Nature Center with me, and who lives in Seattle now and has graciously offered to let me stay with her and her family for most of the week, and she told me about this cute little coffee shop right by Pike Place Market.  So I am now sitting in a cute coffee shop by Pike Place Market, having just finished an iced Americano but not feeling much more awake yet, and waiting for Beth to call so we can go get sushi.

Seattle is really great, as far as I can tell!  It feels a lot like San Francisco, but... cozier, somehow.  Less pretentious, for sure... the barista at this coffee shop was very genuinely friendly, the people at the hotel were very friendly, the people next to me on the train were very friendly.  So far, so good.  I'll be taking pictures over the next few days and hopefully putting up a "Seattle pictures" blog post pretty soon.

The other thing I did this week (and weekend) was try to get experimental stimuli ready to go to France.  Because dude, I'm leaving for France in just over a week.  (!!!!!!!)  And my stimuli are not ready, and that will have to remedied very soon.

Well, I just got a text message from Beth, so it's time to wrap this post up.  I'm so happy to be traveling.  I love traveling.  I can't wait to go to France.  This week is going to be fun but really tiring, but no complaints.  And hopefully I'll get good comments on my poster on Thursday and I'll be ready to turn it into a talk in the next few weeks!  (Yikes!!)

QP (re-)submitted

Well, I turned in another version of my qualifying paper tonight.  Every single day this week, I really thought I would get it done.  I mean, it was already done, how long could it take to make some revisions, right?  Wrong.  Decidedly wrong.  It could take 7 days straight of working on it 4-7 hours a day, in fact, if you were wondering.  Including 8-12 and 2-7 today!  But: it is mostly done.  Unless I totally messed up the statistics (which is by no means impossible), it might - might - get approved in its current version.  And that would be great, because then I can stop rewriting this paper at least for a few months, and come back to it this fall sometime with fresh eyes and new data and no looming due date.  Oh how nice that would be.

Now I just have to prepare a short presentation for my meeting about our Paris project at Stanford in the morning (and I get to catch the train at 7:27!), but I think I'll have plenty of time to throw it together on the train(s).  And then I have to get my annotated bibliography ready for my meeting with the chair of my exam committee on Tuesday (lord help me with that... the bibliography, not the meeting, the meeting will be fine), and then I have a week to prepare for my qualifying exam, which will be on Tuesday the 17th.  And then (then!) I get to throw together my poster for the conference I'm going to in Seattle, because it has to go to the printer on the 18th.  (Oops.)  And then I have 4 days to get my Paris experiment ready before I leave for Seattle, then 5 days in Seattle (which I'm really looking forward to, especially once my poster is sent to the printer!).  Then 4 more days at home getting stuff ready for Paris, I guess, including a second poster which will have to go to the printer while I'm actually in Seattle, come to think of it (oops).  And then, before I know it - Paris!

Lovely, lovely Paris.  I'm so excited, but there's so much stuff to get done between now and then.  I decided I'm not even going to try to work on my conference presentation until I'm actually in Paris, because I'll have 14 days while I'm in Europe to work on it, and I think that should be plenty.  It would be nice if I could collect some more data on my kiddies before I leave, but I'm not gonna hold my breath on that.  Because that would have to be sometime this week (when I should be studying) or sometime at the end of next week, when I might be scrambling to get my Paris stuff ready to go.  We shall see.

Shoot, it's 11:00?  Where does the time go?  At least I got to play some frisbee tonight!  It's so great that it stays light so late now - we played frisbee from 7:00 to almost 9:00 tonight, so that was an excellent break.  I am so glad this frisbee thing has been working out.  I look forward to it every week, and I'm going to miss it this summer!

Oh well, time for bed.  G'night.

parisparisparisPARISparisparis

Psssssssst -

I just bought plane tickets to Paris in June.

< !!!!! >

(That makes me freak out a little inside.)

It will have been almost exactly 5 years since I left Paris by the time I arrive, and my heart does little flip flops when I think about going back.  Isn't that silly?  But I actually clicked the "buy tickets" button, and my credit card has been charged, and I am actually actually actually going in just over a month.

< !!!!! >

Freak out!  Paris!  In June!  Like, in just over a month!!  It is going to be so, so lovely, and I'm going to be there with some friends I like very, very much, and we're doing some awesome and exciting research and I'm going to take my new camera and take lots of gorgeous pictures, and there will be coffee and pastries and long, long runs through the park and dinner and wine and sleeping with the windows open and watching the Eiffel Tower light show at night and wandering around aimlessly and sitting in cafés and perusing bookstores and riding bikes and picnicking by the Seine and maybe taking the train to Brittany to see the kids I used to babysit and oh yeah collecting some second language learner data...

So much to do!  And even more to do between now and the time I leave, but I am just bursting at the seams with excitement!

happiness a-splode

Too bad I said I'd give it back when he comes back...

I'm having trouble typing right now because I've literally played the piano for 6 of the last 16 hours.  It's kind of starting to feel like acute carpal tunnel syndrome, so I should probably cool it for a while, but I just can't stop.  Ohmygodit'ssogood.

My friend Florian left for France this morning, so that makes me kind of sad, but I get to babysit his piano while he's gone, so that makes me ecstatic.  It's actually a really nice, full sized keyboard with weighted keys and everything, so it sounds and plays a lot like a real piano.  I went and picked it up from his house last night, got it home around 10:00, and played the darn thing until 1:15 in the morning.  I just kept going, "Mmmmmmm maybe one more song."  And then 10 or 15 minutes would go by, and I wasn't ready to stop, so I'd find another one.  I even downloaded some sheet music online and I can already play it fairly well, and I was just re-figuring out the chord progression to "Ice Cream" by Sarah McLachlan.  I actually came home from campus around noon instead of doing work because I was so tired from lack of sleep and couldn't stop thinking about playing the piano anyway, so I thought I might as well throw in the towel and play some more.  But it's getting to the point where my fingers aren't responding very well and my wrists hurt a little, so it looks like 6 out of 16 consecutive hours is approximately my limit.  (For now.)

So what does a sleepy, hand-crampy girl do at 2:00 on a beautiful, sunny Friday afternoon?  Eat a bowl of cereal, for one thing.  And blog.  And once that's done, I think I'll actually do some cleaning around here, since the little piles of dog hair and unopened mail and dirty laundry are getting a little ridiculous.

I had a pretty excellent week, all things considered.  I got comments back on my qualifying paper from both of my readers, and they were pretty good.  I've got some semi-major revisions to make, but nothing I wasn't expecting, and now I have some guidance as to how to go about making them.  I met with my advisor yesterday, and as always, it was a pretty great meeting.  And actually, I met with my new advisor today - I recently asked the other professor reading my paper if she would be willing to be the co-director of my dissertation along with advisor #1, so I officially have two thesis advisors now, and I am also officially starting to use the phrase "my dissertation".  Yikes.  I hope I don't regret the "two advisors" thing - I know people have enough trouble trying to get a dissertation approved by one professor, let alone two of them.  The thing is, ultimately it's going to be a much better dissertation, and it's going to make me a better researcher, and I know that, and that's why I did it.  But I'm also trying to be realistic about it and remember to not freak out when I'm trying to please two very smart people who are telling me different, perhaps sometimes conflicting, things.  Hop là, c'est parti!  Too late to turn back now!

I bought my plane tickets for Seattle this week, too.  I'm going to Seattle for a conference during the last week of May, and I'm pretty excited about it.  I don't know what exactly I'm putting on my poster for that conference yet, but I've never been to Seattle, and I have some friends there now, so I'll have fun one way or another!  (But I think the conference itself is going to be pretty great too.)

Well jeez.  I'm pretty sleepy and spacing out, so I might do some laundry and even (gasp!) get out the vacuum.  Unless I get distracted by my new piano again.  Which I'm going to do right... about... now....

CUNY, here I come...

I made this!  It's for the psycholinguistics conference I'm going to later this week.  I asked a few people to look it over and give me comments before Tuesday, but honestly, I'm so tired of messing with it that I might not change it anyway.

I think it just might be good enough.  (Finally.)  And that's good enough.  :)

Edit: I updated this post with the actual final version, which I just sent to the printer a few minutes ago.  Soitcan'tchangeanymoreandI'mgoingtostopthinkingaboutitforgod'ssake.

Songer à Paris

I have Paris on the brain today.  I had a dream in French last night, for no apparent reason, and today I turned in an application for a summer research grant so I can spend some time in Paris this summer.  I'm going to England for sure, but I really want to go spend a few weeks in Paris after that, collecting data from second language learners.  So if I get the grant (and I guess my chances are somewhat decent, from what I hear), then it'll be time to actually buy plane tickets and train tickets and find a place to stay.

So tonight, just for fun, I was looking at places to stay in Paris.  There are websites for tourists, where people rent out their apartments over the summer for somewhat exorbitant amounts of money.  Cheaper than staying in a hotel every night, but not that much cheaper, really.  Then I decided to try searching in French, and I happened on a few websites for Parisians looking to sublet their apartments for a month or two or three at a time.  That is totally the way to go - you can find a perfectly nice place, in a great area, and there are lots more choices, for less money per month than you'd pay per week in a vacation rental.  The only weird thing about it is the idea of subletting from someone in a foreign country.  Subletting is kind of weird anyway, but doing it in a foreign country just seems... slightly extra weird.  But whatever, once I hear back from this research grant and get closer to actually going, I'll contact some people, and you can generally get a feel for people over email.  If anyone is creepy, I'll just not rent from them.  There are definitely enough places that I can afford to be somewhat choosy.  So how crazy-awesome is that??  Spending a few weeks in Paris in my own apartment!  Who knows if this will pan out, but for the moment, I'm fairly excited about the idea of spending some time in Paris again, over the summer, getting to explore some of the things I didn't get to last time.

I was just telling my mom on the phone yesterday - I'm excited about the idea of going back to France, because I feel way more laid back about it this time around.  I was so nervous about making mistakes with my French last time, and always trying to be perfect, and I just have a totally different attitude now. Part of this is having two people (two!) in my life now who I can speak French with, and even though my level of French is somewhat lower than it was the last time I was in France (having forgotten a fair number of words between then and now), I just feel more... accepting of myself.  Like, whatever, people make mistakes when they speak a foreign language, and no one cares.  And I always knew this on an intellectual level, but I feel like I truly accept it more now.  And it helps having actual friends/acquaintances that I can just have a normal conversation with in French, because then the focus is much more on communicating ideas rather than talking just for the sake of practicing a language, which is so artificial.  If you try to say something you actually want to say, and you mess it up, then your friends can tell you how you should actually say that, and you learn something from the experience.  It's way better.

Let's see, what else is new... I started research in a new preschool today.  This is definitely my favorite of the three preschools so far.  The people at this place are so laid back and fun.  It's totally my style.  They had a Fat Tuesday parade today, and all the kids wore the masks and beads they made, and marched around banging their drums they made out of oatmeal cartons while some awesome zydeco music played and everybody danced.  The research is a little more challenging there, because they don't have a dedicated research room, so I have to set up shop in the "dramatic play" room (which is where they keep all their dress up clothes and costumes and musical instruments and things for playing pretend).  There's no door to the room, so sound floats in from the hallway, and there's a little bathroom in there, so one kid had to come in and go potty while I was doing an experiment.  It's probably okay, but it makes me a little nervous with my reaction time measures - I have no idea what that microphone is picking up, I'm just trusting that it's not firing too often from the background noise.  When I tested it back at the beginning of this project, it seemed pretty good at only responding to very close noise.  But I'll have to go back and look at my numbers from today and see if they look reasonable, or if they're kind of all over the place.  Let's hope for the former.

Well, I think that's all I've got for now.  Time for some chamomile tea and bed.  Bonne nuit à tous et à toutes!

Going to England in June!

Dudes!  I finally just heard back from the Child Phonology Conference I applied to, and I'm giving a talk in England in June!

Awesome and exciting and a little scary!!

Back in the Swing of Things

Just for fun, here are a few pictures I snapped on my phone camera while I was in Illinois.

Mmmmmm, the lovely nothingness of central Illinois.  (And I really do mean that.)

The lovely somethingness of Chicago in winter.

And then there was this ridiculous thing asleep on the bed when I got home:

He was sleeping like this, in the dark.

But now I'm back, and it's January, and it's time to get back in the swing of things.  I've been back in the campus preschool this week, collecting more data, and it is so fun.  I started the kids on a new and different task this week, so it's been really interesting to see what they do with it, how they respond to it. We've moved on to production now, which means instead of just listening to words and "silly words", they're saying words and silly words, as fast as they can.  So I'm getting some really cool data on how long it takes them to figure out how to say stuff, and what kinds of errors they make.  (And still what they had for breakfast, and what their favorite movie is, etc., etc... Kids are way more interesting to work with than adults for many reasons, one of which being that they just do stuff that adults don't.  Like stop doing the task in the middle to tell you about their favorite cartoon.)

I snapped this picture of my research room today (you can see me in the one-way mirror on the left side snapping the photo).  I really like my little research room, but it's gotten almost comical how much equipment I have to set up to get it ready.

Your tax dollars at work, folks.  Linguistic research in action.

First I have to plug in the special audio equipment and headphones on the other side of that mirror, so my research assistant can watch and listen in and take notes.  Then I have to set up the laptop, which gets connected to the speakers and the button box.  The button box (that thing on the right) both controls the presentation of the stimuli and gets reaction times for me.  But it's actually really awesome and it can get the reaction time from the kids' voices - except that to do that, you have to hook it in to a microphone.  So I also have a wireless microphone set up.  The mic itself gets hooked to the kids' shirt so it gets their voice, then it sends the signal to the receiver, which is plugged in to the back of the button box.  Then because I'm tricky and clever, I realized I could plug a second receiver into the laptop, so that the laptop can record everything they're saying, too.  So the laptop records the whole session and also presents the stimuli, which is basically a bunch of sound files of me saying "bird!" or "cheek!" or whatever.  And then the kid has to say them back as fast as s/he can (in one of the tasks), and the mic sends it to the laptop to be recorded, and to the button box to get the reaction time for how long it took them to say it.  Whew!  But I'm pretty proud of my little setup.

And finally, a Cute Rye-Dog Picture: 

Cuddle buddy.

I think that will have to be all for now, friends.  I'm kinda tired and still have to walk the dogs and look at my data from today.  Bye for now!


Update:  Wait!  I forgot half of the reason I wanted to write this post!  A really cute and interesting story. One of my professor's son is 3 and goes to the preschool where I'm doing my research.  I actually tested him for the first time today, and we had this exchange:

me:  Did you know I see your mom at my school sometimes?
him:  No!  I didn't!
me:  Yeah!  She's a teacher at my school.
him:  Oh... but she turned back into my mom right now.

I told my professor about it, and it turns out they went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium yesterday, and he was very concerned about missing school.  So they were talking about how it's okay to take vacations sometimes, and the difference between work and school and vacation.  But I guess this little guy took away from that conversation that you can only do one of those things at a time, and by golly, she's his mom right now.

Exciting!

I just submitted my first abstract to a real conference! I'm so excited! The main, biggest, most well-reputed psycholinguistics conference is being held at Stanford this year, and since Stanford is like a 90-minute train ride away and I have some results from my qualifying paper experiment now, I thought it was pretty much my duty to submit something. Worst case scenario, I get rejected, and I have a decent abstract I can submit somewhere else. So that's really exciting - I might get to present at a big psycholinguistics conference in March!

We'll see if I still think it's exciting if I get accepted and then I'm flipping out in March because I have a zillion other things to do and also have to be nervous about presenting research in front of a bunch of psycholinguistic big-wigs for the first time. But hey, we all gotta start somewhere.

I just sort of dropped in to shoot the breeze with my advisor today, and he was so great and warm and encouraging, as usual. I'm feeling excited about my burgeoning academic career these days; presenting some of my own stuff at QP Fest last week was really energizing, and now I'm thinking about getting my work out there and presenting it at like, real, big time conferences, and that's exciting too, albeit a little scary. It's such a weird process. You get this idea and are worried it might be a hare-brained scheme, so you look into it some more, and it's like, hey, this might actually make sense. So you pursue it and pursue it for weeks and months - thinking about it, writing about it, doing the research, thinking about it some more, and all the while you're finding all these little holes in your logic and potential problems with your argument, but you're too invested now, so you keep going. And then you get some results. And they're not what you expected, and you're not sure if that's because your premise was wrong to begin with, or maybe some of those many imperfections in your research procedure caused this weird result. And part of you doesn't even really care anymore and you kind of just want to stop thinking about it and make it go away, and "why did I ever think this was a good idea in the first place?" and so on. Self doubt, loss of self confidence, why-am-I-in-grad-school-and-do-I-really-want-to-be-an-academic-anyway, etc. etc. But if you're lucky, you're forced to turn all of your thought processes and doubts and slightly flawed methodology into a presentation somewhere in there, and if you're lucky, you get really excited and encouraging feedback from people whose opinions you really care about. And suddenly you're all excited again! Like, oh yeah, that's why I got all excited about this! Because it's cool! And maybe those little flaws aren't as big of a deal as I thought and I shouldn't fixate on them too much and maybe these results are pretty interesting after all.

The life of an academic, friends. It's a strange mental world we live in.