In the shower just now, I thought to myself, "I should have a dissertation blog. So I can write all those thoughts I've been having about papers and conference submissions and job hunting." Er, right.
So, a flurry of blog posts at some point, although I'm going to NJ tomorrow for like 10 days, so we'll see.
Showing posts with label meta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meta. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Saturday, June 23, 2007
I'm back
When I get the chance I'll update on my return flight and the nightmare of getting my expenses into Hopkins One.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
On the other side
I feel like I need a complete life detox after being here. The schedule I’ve been keeping certainly gives me more energy, but I don’t think I can keep it up at home. It’s easy to get up at 6:30 when you go to bed at 9:30 or 10 out of total boredom. It’s not so easy when there are fun things to do and people to see at night. But I’ll be very glad to get back to a place where I can actually exercise – between getting mugged and this town being full of annoying people trying to sell me crap, I haven’t been walking as much as I thought I would when I arrived. And my diet has just been awful. Breakfast is always chips, an egg of some kind (often fried), sausage, and bread. Occasionally fruit. And it’s hard to eat healthy foods without a refrigerator and an oven/stove and without consistent means of getting to the supermarket. I’ve been watching Chef at Home and thinking of all the fruits and vegetables and other healthy foods I desperately want to eat.
So, I’m determined to actually go to the Farmer’s Market this summer and to eat well and exercise. And I want to do lots of things outside this summer and get out of the house and not be cooped up with the television. I also want to get to the office and be productive, because I want to get this dissertation hammered out along with whatever I do for work and the eventual jobhunting and conference abstracts and suchlike.
I’ve been fussing a bit about work for the summer and money. I’m waiting to hear from a few people about small amounts of work, which would be fine. I really want to visit Boston and ABQ, but I need to make sure I have the cash for these things (and that any accompanying passengers do too). I will hear about the CDC grant in late summer, probably. I’m extremely ambivalent about the grant. I’ll be thrilled to have a stipend and to be able to say I got it on my resume. But I don’t really want to come back here in the fall; I might be able to deal with spring, but even that makes me feel a little queasy. I try to put on a good face for people who ask when I’m coming back. I wouldn’t mind a two-week trip, but another two-month trip sounds just awful. I’ve also lost some enthusiasm for the idea of doing in-depth interviews about the radio program. I’m not sure we’ll really get the depth of information we’re interested in. And if we don’t have good results from the experimental design there’s really less justification anyway for expending more energy in this direction.
My travels here have solidified my feelings that I’m not really interested in a straight-up communication position. Comm is okay and all, but I really want to stick with public health and be able to see comm. as one tool out of many to improve health. I’ve seen so many huge systemic problems at work here that I can’t possibly pretend developing some radio programs is going to satisfy me entirely.
So, I’m determined to actually go to the Farmer’s Market this summer and to eat well and exercise. And I want to do lots of things outside this summer and get out of the house and not be cooped up with the television. I also want to get to the office and be productive, because I want to get this dissertation hammered out along with whatever I do for work and the eventual jobhunting and conference abstracts and suchlike.
I’ve been fussing a bit about work for the summer and money. I’m waiting to hear from a few people about small amounts of work, which would be fine. I really want to visit Boston and ABQ, but I need to make sure I have the cash for these things (and that any accompanying passengers do too). I will hear about the CDC grant in late summer, probably. I’m extremely ambivalent about the grant. I’ll be thrilled to have a stipend and to be able to say I got it on my resume. But I don’t really want to come back here in the fall; I might be able to deal with spring, but even that makes me feel a little queasy. I try to put on a good face for people who ask when I’m coming back. I wouldn’t mind a two-week trip, but another two-month trip sounds just awful. I’ve also lost some enthusiasm for the idea of doing in-depth interviews about the radio program. I’m not sure we’ll really get the depth of information we’re interested in. And if we don’t have good results from the experimental design there’s really less justification anyway for expending more energy in this direction.
My travels here have solidified my feelings that I’m not really interested in a straight-up communication position. Comm is okay and all, but I really want to stick with public health and be able to see comm. as one tool out of many to improve health. I’ve seen so many huge systemic problems at work here that I can’t possibly pretend developing some radio programs is going to satisfy me entirely.
Friday, June 08, 2007
A week away =
67 new Gmail threads, 35 new emails from my school account, 21 new yahoo emails, and 135 new Nose posts. Yikes!
The safari was awesome and I'm sad I don't have photos, but not having a camera meant I could just enjoy the animals without worrying about getting a good shot. I'll work on a huge epic update (probably split into parts for readability) Sunday and try to upload it before I leave.
The safari was awesome and I'm sad I don't have photos, but not having a camera meant I could just enjoy the animals without worrying about getting a good shot. I'll work on a huge epic update (probably split into parts for readability) Sunday and try to upload it before I leave.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Behind the times
I've been really busy with the study ending and data entry and suchlike, so I haven't so much had good internet time to update. Okay, mostly I've been lazy about typing up notes to dump online when I have the time.
The lake was fun, and I'm glad I got to see it. I'm going to Zambia's South Luangwa NP next week instead of southern Malawi because no one else ever signed up for the trip. I'm actually excited about it because apparently I will see a million animals, and it's the ultimate in not roughing it much at all. It should rule.
12 more days until I get back!
The lake was fun, and I'm glad I got to see it. I'm going to Zambia's South Luangwa NP next week instead of southern Malawi because no one else ever signed up for the trip. I'm actually excited about it because apparently I will see a million animals, and it's the ultimate in not roughing it much at all. It should rule.
12 more days until I get back!
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Dimebag
I tried to post my vids to youtube, but they're not working... soon.
On the way back from the meetings, there were a buttload of people at the bridge... I don't know what they were looking at, and the few we tried to ask seemed to also have no idea, they just noticed the commotion and wanted to see too. So, I think it was a self-perpetuating mob.
I went for a walk near work before grabbing some lunch. I didn't see too much that was interesting. The place near work where I got lunch gave me a dimebag of salt to go with it.
On the way back from the meetings, there were a buttload of people at the bridge... I don't know what they were looking at, and the few we tried to ask seemed to also have no idea, they just noticed the commotion and wanted to see too. So, I think it was a self-perpetuating mob.
I went for a walk near work before grabbing some lunch. I didn't see too much that was interesting. The place near work where I got lunch gave me a dimebag of salt to go with it.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Week 2: Faster than the first
First off, thanks to another benefactor, Jenn, for adding to my sister’s contribution of a Flickr pro account. I’m good for two years now!
Monday was quite busy! I went to my meeting, where we made lots of changes to the survey, which I then had to actually make in the document. Then I went to lunch with my advisor and one of the women in charge of the project at this place that was totally the Malawi version of every fast food place in the US that makes wraps and that kind of thing. Heavy on the chicken, because that’s the most popular meat here. It was the ultimate in non culture shock, but they did make it pleasantly spicy, and there was a bottle of peri-peri (hot spicy herb sauce that is way better than Tabasco) for dipping the French fries (chips) in.
We then trekked out to the workshop to start going over the survey with the interviewers. The place was in the southern part of town, and we drove down this road that had tons of furniture along it! Like, tons of booths with bed frames and poofy couches and chairs. Some of the booths sold coffins; apparently not too long ago pretty much all the places along there sold coffins. Apparently there is less demand for coffins, or some people decided to move their skills to furniture. The poofy couches are all kinds of wonderful garish colors like deep fuchsia velvet. I’ll try to take a photo of the lobby furniture at the hotel, which is more of a gold color.
The workshop was interesting. We had both the Chichewa version of the survey (which was unfortunately at least 2 iterations old in terms of numbering and coding, and also we had new questions) and the English version, and we were going through the instructions in both languages. People would pipe up with questions and issues with the translation, and it was lively, considering how boring it actually was. We didn’t even get through the first section of the survey, but it’ll go faster tomorrow.
I used the minibus to go home for the first time Monday. The new secretary lives up the street from me, so she showed me the ropes. We stood on the side of the road until an Area 12 bus pulled up (that’s the area just past 11). Some people got out, but there were still many people in there. Tinkhani and I crammed into a seat that normally would fit one. Another couple of people crammed into the seat in front of us. All of these seats were rickety, which served to be able to move them a bit to cram more people in more efficiently, but made sitting kind of precarious until everyone got in to balance them. Once all the seats were full, like three more guys, including the money collector, just kind of crouched inside by the sliding door. We stopped at the gas station to fuel up, all crammed in. A few people got off south of City Centre. Then we got off right at my street. Tinkhani told me that when we got off, they said that one munthu and one mazungu were getting off. She said that munthu means person, and mazungu means white, like white folks aren’t people. I thought that was kind of funny, even though I guess it’s probably totally offensive.
So, the minibuses aren’t so difficult, even if they are insane. They’re a very efficient way to move people around the city!
I got home Monday to hear the news that one person had been killed in two shootings at VA Tech. After about an hour, the press conference happened and the numbers shot to 20+ only to go above 30. It was definitely one of those freaky news-watching experiences, esp with the time difference and all this happening during the evening news here.
The international news coverage of this incident has been really interesting. In addition to CNN, which was mostly US feed for the first couple of days, I watched BBC and Sky. These guys are really the liberal media! BBC had a guy on that was basically like, yeah, the US has lots of crime and we’re sadly kind of getting used to these kinds of shootings. Both networks have been talking about gun control in the US in this mystified kind of way about the culture of gun rights, with a tone that this should *obviously* lead to some kind of serious discussion about guns with a realization that it probably won’t. The CNN feed, on the other hand, has mostly focused on the need to improve security on campuses, with discussions even of things like random bag searches and metal detectors. Yeesh.
And then of course there was the whole news of like 200 people being blown up in Iraq, but somehow that seems less worthy of attention because it’s become so common. I think the shock over the VA tech incident has been about right; it’s our lack of shock over these other deaths that is a problem.
Joe called late Monday night to say he was getting calls from the media to comment on the story. He taught during winter term and will teach during summer term a course on school and youth violence, which includes a class on rampage school shootings. So he’s something of an expert. He wrote a column in the Sun for Thursday, and Baltimore folks can see him on WBAL Saturday morning. I’ve had the strange mix of feeling proud that Joe gets to talk about something he knows about and sadness that this expertise is useful at such a terrible time!
Tuesday, I took the minibus to the office. It picked me up right near the Villa, and it wasn’t even full! But soon it was, as they pretty much make stops until it’s crammed beyond belief. I was sitting in a seat shoulder to shoulder, and we still fit another person (a girl who appeared to be at the workshop, oddly… I should have just followed her all the way in). The driver came to pick me up from the officce and told me he’d gone to my house first… oops. People keep telling the poor drivers different things, and they end up with the wrong directions. He took me to the workshop, where it seems they had barely started.
Listening to people speak about half the time in Chichewa was interesting. I didn’t really pick much up, but it’s funny how the patterns of speech are similar and different from us. There’s much more coordination of responses like yes and no (yes being a sort of affirmative sounding grunt, no being “ayi”) than there would be in a similar group in the US. But when there is discussion or joking around the cadences are similar. Actually, Chichewa reminds me of Spanish or Italian a little because the ways vowels and consonants alternate. But there are a lot more m, n, k and z sounds.
We went to lunch at this delicious Indian place that has several branches throughout Lilongwe. It’s good, but we ate there like every day this week, so I think I’m good for a while.
After more workshopping, Rajiv wanted to grab a beer after work. I’m not one to say no to beer, so I went with him and the driver to his hotel, which is much nicer than mine. We had a beer, but we weren’t exactly chillaxing because first we went through the survey to make cuts (it’s hugely long in English, which is even longer in Chichewa since there aren’t simple words for things like “never” and “feelings”). I grabbed a cab home; I expected to pay about $10, but it was more like $6, which I thought was a bargain. There are no meters in the cabs here, just negotiation. But the guy offered 1000 kwacha, and my hotel was kind of far, so I just didn’t even bother to bargain.
Wednesday morning, the driver came to get me to take me to the workshop. We finished going through the survey in the morning, and then in the afternoon we went out to a village called Maenje or Mnchezi, not sure, in the Traditional Authority (kind of like a county) of Chitukula. It was just past these giant maize silos that are near the airport. The juxtaposition of the giant shiny metal silos with the short scrubby mud color of the town was quite something. I took a few photos of the place. I was the most popular visitor; my advisor, being Nepali, has somewhat darker skin and was less obviously out-of-place than I was. I’m pretty dang white. So all the little kids stared and followed me around like I was from another planet. They were fascinated. I helped G through an interview, taking notes along the way about things we needed to change or reword. I thought the village was kind of awesome, but maybe that’s because most of the buildings were tiny like me. They were close together and laid out very differently from modern towns.
Last night I watched the news and when it got boring, I tried to get inspired to do something. But instead I fell asleep at around 7:30, with all the lights on, for about two hours. Then I got up and went to bed. Seriously lazy. But when you get up at 6:30 every day, there are limited ways to get in 11 hours of sleep. Thursday was more workshop, to see how interviews went and to make final changes. Today I’m back in the office and trying to catch up on all my email, blogging, and photo postage.
Now that the survey is going forth, I will turn to working on my study. In the course of visiting the village, I realized that you don’t have to go very far from Lilongwe to be in a really different place, and maybe I can do my study in the outskirts. This has a major advantage budgetwise, in that we can leave and come back every day, so there will be no accommodations to worry about. We have contacts in the surrounding areas, so I can get in touch with them to help me find rooms and help recruit. One disadvantage is that people are close enough to the city to get, like, every radio station, making it possible for them to have listened to the program, but I think that there’s probably so much competition that this is not a problem.
Speaking of the radio, I learned several useful Chichewa words while going through the survey this week. Wailesi is radio… it’s basically wireless pronounced the way they pronounce things here. Same with EZDI, which is AIDS. The ‘i' on the end is pretty silent… just a lift from the ‘s’ sound. Pologalamuyi is program; a lot of the time ‘l’ sounds like ‘r’, and they add vowels, so this crazy-looking word sounds pretty much like program. I have also learned that first person verbs start with ndi and second person is mu. I also learned that the way I say twenty is really twenny, which our translator mocked me for, as people in Malawi actually bother to pronounce t’s. Stop being a British colony already!
Okay, time to do some work before I knock off for the day.
Monday was quite busy! I went to my meeting, where we made lots of changes to the survey, which I then had to actually make in the document. Then I went to lunch with my advisor and one of the women in charge of the project at this place that was totally the Malawi version of every fast food place in the US that makes wraps and that kind of thing. Heavy on the chicken, because that’s the most popular meat here. It was the ultimate in non culture shock, but they did make it pleasantly spicy, and there was a bottle of peri-peri (hot spicy herb sauce that is way better than Tabasco) for dipping the French fries (chips) in.
We then trekked out to the workshop to start going over the survey with the interviewers. The place was in the southern part of town, and we drove down this road that had tons of furniture along it! Like, tons of booths with bed frames and poofy couches and chairs. Some of the booths sold coffins; apparently not too long ago pretty much all the places along there sold coffins. Apparently there is less demand for coffins, or some people decided to move their skills to furniture. The poofy couches are all kinds of wonderful garish colors like deep fuchsia velvet. I’ll try to take a photo of the lobby furniture at the hotel, which is more of a gold color.
The workshop was interesting. We had both the Chichewa version of the survey (which was unfortunately at least 2 iterations old in terms of numbering and coding, and also we had new questions) and the English version, and we were going through the instructions in both languages. People would pipe up with questions and issues with the translation, and it was lively, considering how boring it actually was. We didn’t even get through the first section of the survey, but it’ll go faster tomorrow.
I used the minibus to go home for the first time Monday. The new secretary lives up the street from me, so she showed me the ropes. We stood on the side of the road until an Area 12 bus pulled up (that’s the area just past 11). Some people got out, but there were still many people in there. Tinkhani and I crammed into a seat that normally would fit one. Another couple of people crammed into the seat in front of us. All of these seats were rickety, which served to be able to move them a bit to cram more people in more efficiently, but made sitting kind of precarious until everyone got in to balance them. Once all the seats were full, like three more guys, including the money collector, just kind of crouched inside by the sliding door. We stopped at the gas station to fuel up, all crammed in. A few people got off south of City Centre. Then we got off right at my street. Tinkhani told me that when we got off, they said that one munthu and one mazungu were getting off. She said that munthu means person, and mazungu means white, like white folks aren’t people. I thought that was kind of funny, even though I guess it’s probably totally offensive.
So, the minibuses aren’t so difficult, even if they are insane. They’re a very efficient way to move people around the city!
I got home Monday to hear the news that one person had been killed in two shootings at VA Tech. After about an hour, the press conference happened and the numbers shot to 20+ only to go above 30. It was definitely one of those freaky news-watching experiences, esp with the time difference and all this happening during the evening news here.
The international news coverage of this incident has been really interesting. In addition to CNN, which was mostly US feed for the first couple of days, I watched BBC and Sky. These guys are really the liberal media! BBC had a guy on that was basically like, yeah, the US has lots of crime and we’re sadly kind of getting used to these kinds of shootings. Both networks have been talking about gun control in the US in this mystified kind of way about the culture of gun rights, with a tone that this should *obviously* lead to some kind of serious discussion about guns with a realization that it probably won’t. The CNN feed, on the other hand, has mostly focused on the need to improve security on campuses, with discussions even of things like random bag searches and metal detectors. Yeesh.
And then of course there was the whole news of like 200 people being blown up in Iraq, but somehow that seems less worthy of attention because it’s become so common. I think the shock over the VA tech incident has been about right; it’s our lack of shock over these other deaths that is a problem.
Joe called late Monday night to say he was getting calls from the media to comment on the story. He taught during winter term and will teach during summer term a course on school and youth violence, which includes a class on rampage school shootings. So he’s something of an expert. He wrote a column in the Sun for Thursday, and Baltimore folks can see him on WBAL Saturday morning. I’ve had the strange mix of feeling proud that Joe gets to talk about something he knows about and sadness that this expertise is useful at such a terrible time!
Tuesday, I took the minibus to the office. It picked me up right near the Villa, and it wasn’t even full! But soon it was, as they pretty much make stops until it’s crammed beyond belief. I was sitting in a seat shoulder to shoulder, and we still fit another person (a girl who appeared to be at the workshop, oddly… I should have just followed her all the way in). The driver came to pick me up from the officce and told me he’d gone to my house first… oops. People keep telling the poor drivers different things, and they end up with the wrong directions. He took me to the workshop, where it seems they had barely started.
Listening to people speak about half the time in Chichewa was interesting. I didn’t really pick much up, but it’s funny how the patterns of speech are similar and different from us. There’s much more coordination of responses like yes and no (yes being a sort of affirmative sounding grunt, no being “ayi”) than there would be in a similar group in the US. But when there is discussion or joking around the cadences are similar. Actually, Chichewa reminds me of Spanish or Italian a little because the ways vowels and consonants alternate. But there are a lot more m, n, k and z sounds.
We went to lunch at this delicious Indian place that has several branches throughout Lilongwe. It’s good, but we ate there like every day this week, so I think I’m good for a while.
After more workshopping, Rajiv wanted to grab a beer after work. I’m not one to say no to beer, so I went with him and the driver to his hotel, which is much nicer than mine. We had a beer, but we weren’t exactly chillaxing because first we went through the survey to make cuts (it’s hugely long in English, which is even longer in Chichewa since there aren’t simple words for things like “never” and “feelings”). I grabbed a cab home; I expected to pay about $10, but it was more like $6, which I thought was a bargain. There are no meters in the cabs here, just negotiation. But the guy offered 1000 kwacha, and my hotel was kind of far, so I just didn’t even bother to bargain.
Wednesday morning, the driver came to get me to take me to the workshop. We finished going through the survey in the morning, and then in the afternoon we went out to a village called Maenje or Mnchezi, not sure, in the Traditional Authority (kind of like a county) of Chitukula. It was just past these giant maize silos that are near the airport. The juxtaposition of the giant shiny metal silos with the short scrubby mud color of the town was quite something. I took a few photos of the place. I was the most popular visitor; my advisor, being Nepali, has somewhat darker skin and was less obviously out-of-place than I was. I’m pretty dang white. So all the little kids stared and followed me around like I was from another planet. They were fascinated. I helped G through an interview, taking notes along the way about things we needed to change or reword. I thought the village was kind of awesome, but maybe that’s because most of the buildings were tiny like me. They were close together and laid out very differently from modern towns.
Last night I watched the news and when it got boring, I tried to get inspired to do something. But instead I fell asleep at around 7:30, with all the lights on, for about two hours. Then I got up and went to bed. Seriously lazy. But when you get up at 6:30 every day, there are limited ways to get in 11 hours of sleep. Thursday was more workshop, to see how interviews went and to make final changes. Today I’m back in the office and trying to catch up on all my email, blogging, and photo postage.
Now that the survey is going forth, I will turn to working on my study. In the course of visiting the village, I realized that you don’t have to go very far from Lilongwe to be in a really different place, and maybe I can do my study in the outskirts. This has a major advantage budgetwise, in that we can leave and come back every day, so there will be no accommodations to worry about. We have contacts in the surrounding areas, so I can get in touch with them to help me find rooms and help recruit. One disadvantage is that people are close enough to the city to get, like, every radio station, making it possible for them to have listened to the program, but I think that there’s probably so much competition that this is not a problem.
Speaking of the radio, I learned several useful Chichewa words while going through the survey this week. Wailesi is radio… it’s basically wireless pronounced the way they pronounce things here. Same with EZDI, which is AIDS. The ‘i' on the end is pretty silent… just a lift from the ‘s’ sound. Pologalamuyi is program; a lot of the time ‘l’ sounds like ‘r’, and they add vowels, so this crazy-looking word sounds pretty much like program. I have also learned that first person verbs start with ndi and second person is mu. I also learned that the way I say twenty is really twenny, which our translator mocked me for, as people in Malawi actually bother to pronounce t’s. Stop being a British colony already!
Okay, time to do some work before I knock off for the day.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Malawi blog
Hey people,
I've decided to change the focus of this journal to my Malawi adventure. Mostly because I wasn't using it much for its original purpose of scattered things.
I still don't know when I'm going to be leaving for Malawi. I found out today that the local review board approved our study, and my advisor wants to wait until the Hopkins board gives final approval before I book my flight. Currently it looks like I'll probably be in Malawi from late March to late June. This bums me out a little because it cuts into summer, but I need as much research time as I can get. I'll also be missing my 5th year college reunion and Commencement, but such is the life of a jetsetting international researcher.
Anyway, later on I'll write more about how absolutely not jetsetting/international I really am, what I'll be doing in Malawi, and how I need housing.
I've decided to change the focus of this journal to my Malawi adventure. Mostly because I wasn't using it much for its original purpose of scattered things.
I still don't know when I'm going to be leaving for Malawi. I found out today that the local review board approved our study, and my advisor wants to wait until the Hopkins board gives final approval before I book my flight. Currently it looks like I'll probably be in Malawi from late March to late June. This bums me out a little because it cuts into summer, but I need as much research time as I can get. I'll also be missing my 5th year college reunion and Commencement, but such is the life of a jetsetting international researcher.
Anyway, later on I'll write more about how absolutely not jetsetting/international I really am, what I'll be doing in Malawi, and how I need housing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)