Birding Christmas Blog Alert

My favorite blogger who is both artist, writer, and avid gardener (it's a good combination) is also responsible for my interest in birding.

Bufflehead up close: I hardly knew ya

To be fair, part of the blame should also go to the professor at vet school who routinely shepherds a covey of students out to the lake and back to introduce us to the joys of spotting a bufflehead a quarter mile away. I am not sure I could recognize a bufflehead up close, but that characteristic speck of white that is almost as big as the speck of black is unmistakeable!


Anyway, the blogger is doing the twelve days of Christmas with illustration and commentary.

Coot: Not A Moorhen

The link to Day 3 is here: Three Moorhens (at Ursula's blog)

Moorhen: Not A Coot

Hawaiian Moorhen: Yes Endangered

"...Our American form of this species is not endangered, not threatened, and not apparently in decline. There is a Hawaiian subspecies that’s probably in trouble, by virtue of being a native bird in Hawaii..." 


It's as good a crash course as any in Elementary Birding for the North American Continent.

And on that note, if you are a birder, consider participating in the Christmas Bird Count. It is the longest-standing science project for citizen scientists (113 years and counting), and one of the cooler ways to "do science" without being an official scientist. Literally cooler, at this latitude. It helps track bird populations and habitat trends. Bonus point: As a poster-child for citizen science, it has helped persuade academics and researchers--to some degree--that normal people can contribute meaningful information to science, without having a PhD.*

*An actual scientist told me this.

test

Testing link to a recording of piano music (Jessica's theme, from the movie The Man From Snowy River).

Studies in digestion

I beautifully procrastinated on my biostats homework yesterday by learning about the Rule of 20. This is the mnemonic for all the many many thingies* to check on patients in critical care. My favorite by far is nutrition, because it is so important and yet easy to overlook. It requires thinking of the digestive tract as a true ecosystem all of its own. Vet school was the first place I had come across this notion, in such a way that it made sense** and it recasts the world when you start thinking of your intestines as something not unlike Pike Place Market. Fewer fish flying through the air, y'know, but otherwise, just like. It's not just the easily angered proletarian masses of bacteria, either. There's the constantly sloughing, constantly regrowing cells that balance the tract and absorb nutrients and respond to the environment. If they don't get fed, they are subject to atrophy, microscopic ennui robbing them of purpose.

So feeding the patients is important and feeding the patients in a normal way, i.e. the food goes into their stomach, then moves on to their intestines in due course. The odd nasogastric tube or surgically placed stomach tube takes nothing away from this process, but parenteral nutrition (enteral being the normal way), in which we inject a nice amino acid slurry through the IV catheter, misses the point of keeping ALL the patient's systems healthy. It is sometimes necessary, but it means that the instant that patient can hold down anything--usually the most pureed chicken-flavored baby food that money can buy--someone gets to start feeding him globs of it on a tongue depressor.

But today is back to biostats. I am indulging in a good breakfast, a la the importance of digestion, inspired by my conversation with myself:
--"I want french toast."
--"We always have french toast."
--"What spices can I use that I haven't put in french toast before?"
--"Um...we've used cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, thyme, basil, pepper, cloves, and rosemary..."
--"Oo, I found rose extract!"
--"..."
--"Surely that would work?"
--"To the internets!"

And I found a lovely rose-cardamom french toast recipe here.




*technical term
**Apparently for things to make sense I need to spend about twenty hours staring through a microscope at intestinal biopsies.

Social Trust, Spaghetti Junctions

Apropos of my class in risk communication, which is starting to wind down, I came across this article ( Atlanta Journal-Constitution article on Atlanta's Metro ) about Atlanta's problem getting their metro system fixed up.

The gist of the story is that everyone in Atlanta knows the city's metro system needs to be updated in a major way, and astoundingly, everyone is willing to pay for it (more or less...about 2/3 said they would put money down). So far so good, right? Even the suburbanites have started asking when they're going to get rail, which goes to show how awful the commute has gotten.

But when the referendum to put $7.2 billion into roads and metro was up for voting this summer, it was turned down.

How?

Because the people of Atlanta, according to the poll described in the AJC story, don't trust their public officials not to screw it up.

The determinants of trust, for corporations and government agencies, are pretty basic.

• 1. Competence, expertise
• Yep, that one's been screwed up by highway construction that didn't finish on time, by decisions to put trains in politically convenient locations, and general inability to fix the existing transport problems.

• 2. Commitment to the public good
• Also damaged, mostly by political scandals and corruption cases

• 3. Concern, care
• Political shenanigans don't help with this one either. Transparency can go a long way here, and probably got damaged during previous roadwork projects where toll roads popped up without warning, that sort of thing.

Atlanta's public officials have apparently managed to strike out on all the major determinants of social trust at the city level, according to the poll. And look, consequences! No money for needed civil engineering!

Hopefully the poll will help them figure out what they have to do to prove they can responsibly handle billions of dollars. It might take a while. Especially with all the traffic.

I like Atlanta, but I have to agree, its transportation system is a mess.

Grad School vs Vet School

As a veterinary student, it was a given that time was not only a valuable commodity, but it would be spent on SLEEP, the sooner the better. And maybe studying, and perhaps two hours a week could be diverted into the most basic of life maintenance, such as eating dinner with family members, significant other, or the one non-vet-school friend who still found your stories about animal anatomical oddities entertaining (it's important to hold onto friends like that). 

Then there is grad school. Grad school does not cling quite so tenaciously to your life as vet school.

Vet school latches on the second day of orientation and for the next four years reminds you constantly that you are going to be a Doctor, with Responsibilities, to say nothing of Board Exams. Also you have two patients to write discharge instructions for and rounds starts in an hour and you haven't looked up ketoacidosis in small ruminants yet.

Also you need to do treatments, like, now.

Grad school, on the other hand, stretches luxuriously in the morning, looks at the clock, and says, "Eh, I don't have any classes or work on Wednesday, I'll sleep in a little and be better rested to work on my essays." (Obviously people who have jobs to juggle with classes are going to be in more of a vet school category of time management.)

Nor does grad school place the same emphasis on facts...facts are secondary to the bigger picture of synthesizing ideas, making connections, and revising your resume to a finely honed reflection of your finest career attributes.

The veterinary student side of me freaks out about this.
The grad student side goes, "I will think about things...hm, what should I make for dinner?" Once in a while the grad student side also goes, "Holy cow, I have a lot of homework to catch up on." However, there are always a few more hours in the day, we're mostly just skimming articles anyway, and it's important to take time...to synthesize.

And then you get to that point in the semester where all the essays come due, the one class that involves knowing facts has an exam and it occurs to you that with all the synthesis and all the leisurely discussions, you still don't know what your job would actually entail. And then grad school is just like vet school but with even less certainty of what you do when you graduate, except that you aren't done for the day when you leave the school because there's always more essays to write and readings to synthesize.

And it's a lot harder to write discharge instructions in AMA style.

The internship hunting process

I cannot help but reflect that, had I known six months ago that my back-up plan for public health was going to be getting some more clinical experience by way of an internship, I would have been a little more careful to talk to some interns in the many interesting places I was visiting. Everything was public health-themed, however, and there are enough alternate paths in that field alone to keep a student busy figuring out all the options.

I also would have contacted some of my clinicians from school earlier and made sure that they could recognize me from the crowd. And that they covered a range of specialties (tip: selection committees are made up of clinicians...and they expect to see clinician letters of recommendation. Epidemiologists, even epidemiologists with a medical degree, do not quite count). 

There has been scrambling, added to the scrambling for school and mid-term essays, and the scrambling on the other end of the intern hunting process, which is going and looking at the clinics I'm applying to. I was disappointed in the internet's paucity of advice on this topic. Questions that occurred to me:

1. What do you wear if you are visiting a clinic for a day? Nice scrubs? A suit that can survive the odd encounter with a patient? I suspect most clinics don't intend to let unvetted (pardon the pun) intern applicants touch the animals, much less treat them. But...you never know. There are clinics that do, assuming that if you are put together enough to be visiting for internships, you must have reached a basic level of competence in fourth year.

EDIT: A suit. Everyone I saw was dressed as for an interview. I was dressed as for an interview and fit right in. Have a suit that you can stand to get pet-hair on because the chances are good you will end up restraining an enthusiastic golden retriever puppy for a student or a tech or a clinician.

2. How much time can you expect to spend? What is a good amount of time? On the one hand, I can see how tripping in, looking around, and tripping back out again isn't going to make a good impression. But how long do you stay if you've gotten a feel for the place and are on a tight schedule for the next visit? Do you plan on staying a whole shift? In some clinics that's a five hour day, if they're not busy. In others it is 14 hours and counting. And if it is the latter...at which point do you politely begin to edge to the door?

EDIT: Five hours seemed the average. You've started to get tapped out on the question front, the clinicians are still working and have asked you all the questions they're going to. If you have the whole day and are really excited about seeing some procedures go ahead and ask to borrow some scrubs, but otherwise say thank you and head out.

3. How exactly does one go about cornering the current interns to ask them if they are the happy sort of zombie-med-students or the unhappy sort?  One clinic I was at had happy zombies, but with that special desperation of doctors who have one day a month to sleep.

EDIT: Around hours 3-4 the clinicians lose interest in you and you can shadow the interns. I got a much better sense of the intern culture at one clinic by stopping in at their closet-sized "lounge" while they were taking a Christmas-cookie break. The intern space says a lot too--this one was clearly used and kept up from year to year.

I'm sure more questions will occur presently, but I'm starting to feel a bit zombieish myself.

EDIT: My unexpected favorite question to ask: What are you looking for in a candidate? I liked this question because it let me see what the clinic was looking for and whether that fit with what I can expect to offer as an intern. It sometimes sparked really long tangential conversations. It's only moderately awkward to ask, it helps to remember that you are interviewing them almost more than they are interviewing you.

What to do if...

...you dump a quarter cup of cinnamon into a half a cup of applesauce?

I opened the wrong side of the shaker top.
Maybe mixing it into cookies?

Letters, explained in 7 steps

 I sense I am entering a letter-writing phase. 

This is brought on by newly acquired stamps (they've got pretty pictures!) and the most recent card from a friend in immaculate handwriting that, try as I may, I will never come close to replicating. Also, I haven't sent mail in weeks. I'm not very conscientious about it--if I got really desperate, I could always write to family, of all people--but I start getting twitchy when I realize I haven't used up any stationery in the last month (it means I'm not allowed to buy more. It's like yarn, that way--you know you're really not supposed to by another three skeins until you've finished that afghan, but they're so pretty...). 

Of course, it's hard to write letters into a void. The occasional word of encouragement works wonders. One friend I write to on a semi-annual basis has a reply rate of once a year, so we're even. It just has to translate as, "Yes please keep writing me letters", and not, "oh by the way I got another letter from you and feel compelled to let you know, but you Really Should Not Bother." I don't think I've encountered the latter

In classic go-to preparation, I googled "letter writing" to see what comes up. And---gosh, how-to websites seem to have cornered the market on this. Their average article goes like this:

Step 1: Dear ____
Step 2*: How are you? How is the weather? How is the family? How is the potted plant? How is the planning of ultimate doom coming along? (pick 2-3)
Step 3: I'm fine. The weather is sleeting. The family is blooming. The potted plant is coping. It is proceeding as I have foreseen.
Step 4: An interesting thing happened to me today. [Insert interesting thing]**
Step 5: Oh golly would you look at the time? 
Step 6: Please write. Or don't. I only put it in because ehow.com said I should.
Step 7: Find a more interesting link and follow away from the topic of letter writing. Your friends and family are safe for another week.



*Step 2 may be moved to follow step 4.

**When one of these letters is written by a medical professional, step 4 can get really weird--assuming you are able to wade through the acronyms. Having received one or two case studies-disguised-as-letters, I speak from experience.



Part II, (work in progress):

Not to knock the wikihows, I was hoping for something a little more substantive. Like examples of awesome letters written by famous writers. I found one reference to a book of Saul Bellow's letters. Aside from the enlightening influence of wikipedia, I have not idea who Saul Bellow was, except he evidently was a very highly esteemed writer who also wrote lots of letters, helpfully collected into a book. I read one of the excerpts. It was promising, entertaining and evocative, almost enough to convince me I should read one of his books before I read his letters.

Then I followed the wikipedia link to one of his books.
Oh, he's one of those writers.

I'm finding that the famous authors who receive all sorts of literary acclaim are less fun to read. I'm biased toward SciFi/Fantasy anyway, but I feel about famous works of literature the way I feel about most abstract art: vaguely annoyed that I have to read up on three hundred years of literary theory to know what the point was. Also, it seems to be a trope that if it wasn't deep enough, toss in disturbing treatment of children. Someday I maybe will get really into high literature and eat my words, but at the moment, I have seen this trend:

I like famous authors talking about the real world.
I do not like their books.

This so far has held true for Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Kurt Vonnegut, plus a few others who do not come to mind right now. Something about really good writers who then go and write groundbreaking treatises on the human condition fails to hold my attention, but I do love reading their missives.

U.S. Global Image Quiz

http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/10/22/u-s-global-image-quiz/
U.S. Global Image Quiz

Take this quiz to find out if you have any clue how the US is doing on the world stage.

It may help if you are a frequent reader of Scandinavia and the World. It might not help much, but you will be less surprised at the results. Of course, if you are not from the United States, you'll probably do fine.

I did not (quite) get them all wrong. 

Sorry, Fresh Out of Interviews, Try Again Next Year

Last week they got around to posting rejections for EIS.

Not surprising I failed to make the cut ("record number of applicants" is a phrase floating around), but it took me a couple of days to get over the sense, not of rejection, but that the potential was still hanging about in the air. Very odd. The last time I was deeply invested in an application that did not turn out, I felt terribly shot down the second I saw the e-mail saying, "Many qualified applicants..."*

This time was more: "Wait, was that it? Bit anti-climactic, muttermuttermutter..."**

Ah, well, it obviously is not yet my time to go into a public health fellowship of that magnitude. 

And yet and yet. It took a couple of days though to even start considering the possibility of doing something else. I mechanically signed up for the internship match program, although for the time being I feel far more pessimistic about my chances. I have started lurking by the door after class and asking professors about projects with more of a communications focus. And one night I spent a few hours browsing the internet on unrelated topics, ending in a pity-party during which I convinced myself that everything I thought about the world is wrong, there is no justice, yadda yadda yadda.

Then I got my hair cut, suddenly realized I look like Diana Rigg from the Avengers (at least have potential for it, if I can ever recreate what my stylist did), had tea with a friend who studies 19th century French literature (how about that for a different perspective?) and discovered that KT Tunstall is THE best music for when I'm feeling down.

Having recovered equilibrium and done some studying, today I was finally up to sending e-mails to the kind people who helped me prepare my application. And they replied with so much generosity, whether brief avowals of support or more elaborate advice on how to cope (cake decorating may have been mentioned), it was a lovely reminder that yes, I was applying to something that would have been a huge challenge, but they had faith in my ability to do it enough to support me and to continue supporting me now, whatever I set my sights on next.

*Of course, I immediately signed up for a three-week intensive art course which turned out to be the most personally fulfilling experience outside of vet school I've had, so it worked out okay...Forever raising the stakes on what I do after rejections, because it must live up to the bizarre expectations raised by the times my alternative plans worked out.
**Stretching the waiting out to 40 days (or thereabouts) may have had something to do with this.

Question: if it is impossible to know the true population mean except by theory, why does it show up in biostats intros so much? I ignore this question usually.

I am struck by the nice binding and spacious margins on this biostats book from 1964. Much easier to make tidy notes on the pages. More fun way to study.

Living like a Grown-up

In my perpetual avoidance of homework, I came across this lovely post: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/what-do-you-need-to-live-like-a-grown-up.

The author listed AA batteries, light bulbs, toilet paper, basic cooking supplies, and living things. All of which I've had...um...actually, I think I kept a stock of all of the above since I was a freshman in a dorm. Overprepared, maybe. And then I had one apartment for six years, which allowed for much accumulation. Even given that most of it was immediately lost to the winds of change when I moved, however, I did not and still don't feel like a grown-up. So I really enjoyed the comments, which opened up all sorts of possibilities.

• Art on the walls. That has been carefully chosen. I would add, that has nice frames. Definitely the most grown-up moment I've had was getting a print framed to put in my new place. Now I just need art for all the other walls...
• Space for guests. Visiting my sisters twice in a row made a huge impression on me. One was in the process of moving. I slept on the couch, surrounded by cardboard boxes, and listening to the wheeze of the geriatric pet rat. I had lots of fun, and the rat survived the visit, but I was definitely living out of my luggage! When I visited my other sister, I slept on the couch again, but the living room was immaculate, and there was a spot for my luggage to sit quietly out of the way. Having traveled excessively since then, I've gotten to see the really nice guest rooms and the let's-just-shove-this-off-the-couch-there! My old apartment had the space but not the organization. My new apartment has the space but not the furniture (discretionary income helps, it turns out), so I'm not there yet. 
• A full bed. 'Nuff said.
• Although...nice bed linens, a duvet with a nice cover, and three pillows more than you really need are a requisite part of any grown-up bed.
• Basic cooking supplies. I've been covered on this front for years, the trick has been not having so many cooking supplies they start to obscure each other.
• A dining table, table linens, and nice china. I don't know that I require the full china service, but a pair of wine glasses is a necessity. And a wine bottle. It's really easy when you drink wine maybe once a year, because then you just wait for someone to give you a bottle and you are set.
• Tea. Teapot. Teacups. Little plates. This is not the same as dining. This is TEA.
• Sad to say, a television and accompanying equipment. It's hard to host movie night otherwise. 

And the intangibles (so much more important!)

• A cleaning schedule
• A specific space for dropping all bags and coats that does not block the door and is NOT the middle of the living room. 
• Control over the placement of furniture. These days I visit my parents' house, look around, and go, "Hm, these chairs have been in the same place for fifteen years...they could be rearranged."
• This is very different from trading out old chair from the curb for new chair from the curb.
• Waking up before the alarm clock goes off.
• A morning routine
• Going to bed at the same time every night, before midnight.
• Having a savings account. Putting money in the savings account is a bonus.
• MAKING SUSHI!!!
• *ahem* From memory.

Please pardon me, it is autumn

The purple ash outside my apartment is being gorgeous. It's hard to be sad too much with such ridiculous beauty going unappreciated. If it weren't impossible to replicate the sun falling through the leaves and the gentle gradation from buttery yellow to illuminated burgundy with veins of green on every leaf, and leaves in bunches and the dark thin branches half hidden, it would be worth learning to paint this single tree. But even then I would still miss the sky's illusory blue, and the ability to reach out and touch the cool smooth rough-edged leaves. All I can do is sit and stare until a box elder beetle lands distractingly in my hair, life pulls me away, and fall passes, taking the colors.

Thankfully, too, or I'd never get anything done.

EIS wait wait wait Oh look a diversion

wait wait wait

One of those group exercises was inflicted in us during class today. You know, "take this quiz and then we'll split you up into groups and talk about a semi-arbitrary way to split hairs when describing personality types." It sounded an awful lot like the Myers-Brigg exercise we had at the beginning of vet school. Maybe doing a full Myers-Brigg analysis works better (or maybe not...thanks Wikipedia!) than the truncated versions you find on Grad School Orientation Day, but it always puts me in mind of reading the horoscope: omg my horoscope describes me so perfectly...and so do the other eleven! (Unless it's the Onion's horoscopes...)

 The questions on the quiz were not promising. All of them could have been answered by "It depends". And the arbitrary groups were maybe a tad arbitrary. However, it turned into a decent exercise nonetheless. Four groups, delineated by color, roughly broke down into:

 1. The talkative people who want people to be nice and get along and have a good time, and are we all on the same page?
 2. The pragmatic people who just want to get it done and get it done right. Also, punctuality is important.
3. The academic-minded who will pore over the details, are a little baffled by these emotions that other people make such a big deal out of, and want to think the problem through.
4. The energetic creative types who will move on a problem immediately, try out new things, and have no concept of punctuality (luckily they tend to get things done without it). Are we done yet?

 I liked the breakdown, surprisingly, despite past experiences with MB. I fell into the first and last categories most, which explains why my sister and I operate on such drastically different measures when it comes to farming. Meanwhile, the long wait continues. I figure all bets are off now, limbo is now installed for the month of October and anyway, in two weeks it will be time to start looking at internships for next year.

EIS Jeopardy

It is 25 days after the EIS application deadline. No word yet...

EIS = the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the CDC program for training people in applied epidemiology. Sounds dry, yeah? Disease sleuthing is the better name for it, things like investigating food outbreaks, for example listeria in ricotta cheese a week ago. There's not a lot of first-person accounts of the application process, though, which makes it a mite more harrowing.

This summer was spent gathering letters of recommendation, filling out the online forms (describe every job, volunteer experience, and educational activity you've ever done), and now is the waiting. 

Wait wait wait. 

Check online status of submission.

Where's my license? WHERE?? Oh, there it is.

Wait wait wait.

Call. Find out where the last bit of paperwork got lost in the stacks. 

Wait.

Check online status of submission. Oh goody, now it's being reviewed.

Wait wait wait.

Text other applicants compulsively, commiserate about the misery of not being rejected upfront.

Obviously from this post, I applied.

It's a long shot for me. I'm still working on my masters in public health and have less field experience than most candidates. Also, I'm a veterinarian. This is both good and bad. There have been veterinarians in EIS (Pappaioanou, 2003, a great article if you are a DVM obsessing over your EIS application, as is this powerpoint), but the majority of officers appointed are human medical doctors who have already done a residency.

 Still, I got to attend the EIS conference this spring, and it was full of fascinating people and such scope for practicing communication AND population medicine that I would be a fool not to try to get in. It's obscure outside the sphere of public health, though, and I hadn't even heard of it until I was partway through vet school.

Now, of course, they've made a nice movie (Contagion) with Kate Winslet as the EIS officer, and the service has become better known (by the handle: You know that movie with Kate Winslet and people dying? No, not the one with a boat).

Correspondingly, the applicant pool has doubled.
Thanks, Hollywood *shakes fist*

wait wait wait

Anyone have a good list of fidgeting techniques?

Externship + Echidna = New Plan

I quite liked talking in undergrad, and writing and design and all those communication skills that were then ground into paste by several years at vet school, where I was surrounded by people smarter, more experienced, and more committed to saving animals. It's not that I don't like saving animals, I am very much in favor of cows and I have great love for emergency medicine (finally, a job compatible with my sleep schedule!).

Then, during fourth year, I went to Australia. My determination to travel abroad manifested in a two week visit to the land down under, where I just saw the nice parts (Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra) and spent a week with smart, experienced people committed to learning about and, where possible, saving wildlife. I like wildlife on principle and in practice, though I suspect regurging seabirds is not in my future. But there were so many places it overlapped with human health: oysters as environmental harbingers of water quality, bats and birds and little predators as pest control, and the Great Barrier Reef as a rather troubling indicator of degraded ecosystems. Yet at the same time, intense frustration with the media and with human beings in general for not recognizing the importance of these environmental markers.

Oh look, said a little voice in my mind, a niche! Because I'm always trying to work communication science into my ambiguously defined career.

And then I saw echidnas eagerly waiting for play time with the keeper at the Melbourne zoo, and hey, if there is a job where I get to travel to random places and see things like that, AND use communication science, AND the principles of veterinary medicine, I want to do that.

Fortunately I'd already applied for the masters of public health program. Even better, I got in.

Of course, now I have a ton of essays to write on the human health care system, which has nothing to do with echidnas.