Flights booked!

My flight is booked! I will head to Atlanta on Saturday, April 7th for G's wedding, and then I will leave there Easter Sunday for Malawi. I will arrive there on Tuesday. I'll be back June 12!

People can contact me on Skype when I'm on the internet. My username is same as always.

If you want a postcard, email me with your address.

In other news, it appears I have housing settled. If something cheaper doesn't crop up, it looks like I'll be staying at the Area 11 Villa in Capital City. Lilongwe has two major areas, Capital City and Old Town. Capital City is where the embassies and government buildings are. Old Town has more stores and the bus station and stuff like that. They are separated by a nature sanctuary; it has hyenas. Lilongwe is split into Areas, and they are numbered by age; so Area 1 is the oldest, Area 2 the next oldest, etc.

Lilongwe is apparently kind of dull, but I think it will be a good place to settle in. It has stores and a post office and internet. I can get adjusted there before wandering too far.

Microcredit

I commented on this on Am's blog, but Nicholas Kristof wrote a column today about microfinance (Times Select only, which is free these days if you have a .edu email addy). Through the website www.kiva.org you can loan people in the developing world money to expand their money-making operations. The article talks about how loans were used by a baker to open a second bakery and benefit from economies of scale in ordering flour and oven fuel and by a TV repairman who is able to keep spare parts on hand due to the extra capital from his loan. Many of the loans are used to help women create and expand small businesses. A really high percentage of loans are repaid, which means that you can re-use your money again and again to help others. Commercial lenders in these countries often charge insane interest, so these kinds of loans are waaay better.

Kiva also allows you to give gift certificates, which people can use to make a loan, and then once the loan is re-paid they can re-loan the money or withdraw it. It's a great way to make the $25 you send to your nephew for his birthday mean a lot more -- it's still $25, but it helps someone eat before it becomes a video game.

IRB Approval!

I just got the good word by email! Hooray!

Maybe this Easter weekend travel is happening after all! I have to look into flights, and I still don't have housing there, but at least now things are settling.

I might very well have a research assistant, which is great.

Once I have a totally set date, I will post here and email the world.

Easter weekend?

My advisor says he thinks we're going to get IRB approval early next week, and he thinks I should go Easter weekend. This is like 4-6 weeks later than I originally planned. Totally lame.

This also means I will probably miss Commencement and my reunion.

So, working on the CDC grant the other day, I decided to look at our review board application and realized that at some point, we decided not to interview people in HIV testing clinics. Thank goodness I take notes on meetings... I realized the boss in Malawi said we shouldn't do those because the project doesn't have a good relationship with the Ministry of Health, who runs the public clinics. So I'm really going to end up proposing something much like my original proposal, which included in-depth interview with the radio diarists and producers and audience members. Fine with me... I found enough stuff on the CDC website I can point to for the purpose of making my project fit with their mission. I just gotta get this crap done now.

NIH biosketch

The National Institutes of Health require this thing called a biographical sketch for all their grants. It's really designed for people who are further along in their careers than grad students. All the examples are, like, doctors or full professors who have had 6 RO1s (major NIH grants) in the last 3 years. While I have managed to pack my CV with exciting things, most of those things are not desired in the biosketch. This makes it very puny and sad and not at all a flattering way to represent my many talents.

Loads of BS

So last week, while still waiting to hear from the IRB so I can book my damn travel, I spent some time applying for school grants. These involved writing short essays. They were kind of BS, with a strong positive correlation between amount of BSness of the question and the amount of money of the grant. I applied for three, so I hope to get one.

I'm also applying for a dissertation grant from CDC, as I think I mentioned. It's too bad this isn't going to NIMH, because my project is perfect for the AIDS section there. CDC requires a little bit of tweaking to make the focus fit well. The stuff I propose to add is on testing, so that will help. I pasted chunks of my proposal into the research plan, but I need to do a lot of cutting and some adding and reframing. Boo. But at least I feel like I made a start.

I'm also supposed to get a questionnaire together for my various meetings with my advisor on Monday. I don't really want to, but I guess I'll work on it tomorrow. I'm lazy.

ABD!

That's "All But Dissertation" for the uninitiated. It makes the dissertation part of this whole PhD enterprise seem like some afterthought to all the hoops you jump through before that. Other terms: I can now be called a PhD Candidate instead of just a plain ol' PhD student. I can also register for thesis credits for next term!

All this is a result of passing my schoolwide orals, which were today at noon. Sarah had decreed the schoolwides to be easier than department exams, but she also only had one new committee member for schoolwides. I had three sharp cookies who hadn't already seen the presentation, so they asked lots of questions that were good. Some were hard to answer, not because I didn't know the answer, but because their questions pointed to difficult realities I've been banging my head against for a while now. So this exam left me with a less fuzzy feeling than the department orals, but it's just a reflection of the reality that I have a lot of work ahead.

Two of the schoolwide committee members commented that it seemed like a short time to go to Malawi and that they predicted that I wouldn't want to leave. I was glad Joe wasn't around to hear that and have several heart attacks.

On a meta note, at G's request I have set up an RSS feed for this blog. I like to procrastinate by visiting every page I read, so I've never used such a thing, so let me know if something is broken.

Nothing to see here

I didn't hear anything from the IRB today, nor did I hear back from the field about whether they like the new plan for me to postpone qualitative research until I have more money. So, still no flight.

Today I've been reading about the history of HIV and politics in Malawi, along with the intersection between HIV and poverty, in prep for orals.

Change of plans

So yesterday I met with my advisor. I told him about this new dissertation funding that CDC/NIH just announced, and then we looked at my budget and timeline for my project and decided it was really tight. He suggested that I go for two months instead of three and do the quantitative studies, and then I'll apply for this dissertation funding to do the qualitative studies and go back sometime later, like maybe before or after rainy season.

This is really great, because that means I would be back in time for Commencement and my 5th reunion, and all of summer. Two months is also much saner than three. So now I just need to check in with the whole study team and see what they think. If they're willing to pony up the extra money, then I may still go for 3 months, but I kind of doubt they will. I think I have a good shot at getting this additional funding, which means I can do a really good job with the qualitative stuff.

Unqualified

I will be taking my second and final oral exam next week, the schoolwides. After I pass (fairly sure thing), I will be deemed qualified to complete independent research.

Hahahahahaha.

In reality, I'm really only qualified to fake it at this point. And it would be one thing if I were doing my research here. I could fake it pretty good here. But I'm going to be doing my research in this totally strange and faraway place, and I can barely begin to do basic things like figure out a budget. How much will a research assistant cost? How much will a room cost to do the study? I have no idea. How far away are all the places I need to go? If I knew I had to travel from Baltimore to New York, I would know how to do that and roughly what it would cost. But if I have to travel from Lilongwe to Blantyre or some little village... I have no idea. Basically I'm diving into independent research in a situation where all the regular parameters are unfamiliar.

It's nuts!