Statistically Significant

It was a pretty quiet week here in Somerville, although there were a few interesting points along the way.

Last semester, my friend Julia convinced me to take two dance classes with her at FitRec: salsa and tango. Dancing was something I’d been meaning to try for a while and the price was certainly right, so I signed up. Each class met once per week for an hour, and even though most of that hour seemed to be spent reviewing the material from the previous week, we still managed to cover the basics and have a good time in the process. The fun, laid-back style of salsa was also a nice contrast to the rigid tango procedures. (I’d highly recommend the PHP dance experience if you’re at BU and looking for something fun to do!)

About halfway through the semester, students in my salsa class started inviting me to the weekly BU Salsa Club meetings. As I quickly learned, these 2-hour classes were more intense, covered more material, and moved more quickly, which were all good things in my mind. I attended BUSC pretty consistently for the rest of the semester and had some of my best times at BU there. It was very well organized, with different guest teachers coming in every week to teach routines and various aspects of salsa. The guy/girl ratio was usually fine, the music was excellent, and salsa is just a lot of fun.

When I moved to Fort Lauderdale in May, I was really going to miss my Boston salsa routine, but moving back to the Boston area meant I could pick up where I left off. BUSC still has weekly meetings on Tuesday evenings from 6:30-8:30 PM in the basement of the GSU. They’re free, open to the public, and tons of fun! And this past week’s lesson was probably one of the best BUSC has had yet. Taught by two members of Hacha y Machete who were both phenomenal dancers/instructors and attended by 50+ people, the hours flew by as we learned single and partner routines and watched a little performance at the end. I don’t know when HYM will be leading another class next, but if you’re interested in BUSC, join the Facebook group and the club president, Nadia, will be happy to inform you of every dance-related anything within a 50-mile radius of your current location.

When I wasn’t using my evening for salsa dancing, I was apartment hunting in the Union Square area with my current roommate and her friend. We were shown three apartments this week and ended up applying for one of them, so hopefully things will work out and we’ll have a nice place to live next year! This pretty much locks me into the greater Boston area for next year, so one way or another, I’ll be finding a job for the fall, applying to graduate programs during the winter, working through the spring, and doing something fun during the summer before diving into a Ph.D in the fall of 2010. I have a couple of job opportunities that I’m currently pursuing, and I’m hopeful that at least one of them will work out. More to come on the job front as I learn more.

Yesterday, a friend of mine from BU who’s living in New York City this summer, Kelly, ended her Massachusetts tour with a day of hanging out with me. We grabbed some brunch at Zoe’s, a cool little diner over in Harvard territory. After signing into Twitter and searching for “Somerville,” about half of the entries referred to the Art Beat festival, so we headed over to Davis Square. It was your typical arts festival: booths set up with paintings/photography/crafts, food from local restaurants, street performers, live music (with interesting instrumentation), and the general public having a good time. After our initial sweep of the place, we ducked into Mr. Crepe and found ice water and a strawberry/dark chocolate crepe to enjoy. Afterwards, we wandered around for a little bit longer before heading home, stopping at the supercool Conway Playground on the way. Aside from the heat, it was quite a fun day!

Another exciting week in the life of Hoxie has come and gone.  It was so exciting, in fact, that I posted this on Monday instead of Sunday.  I apologize to my 2 faithful followers… heads have rolled for this mistake, believe me.

At this point, I’ve been working for Biogen Idec for a month.  A few thoughts on that:

1. I still love it.  The people and resources are still great, the work is still interesting, I still love riding my bike down and having access to a 24/7 company gym, and I still enjoy the cafeteria/campus.

2. Given #1, I’m sad that economic times are tough and that I most likely won’t be hired at the end of the summer, regardless of my performance.  My supervisor is really trying to extend my stay until the end of the calendar year, and it will be incredible if it happens, but I’m trying to be realistic and not get my hopes up.

3. The end is definitely in sight!  Interns at Biogen Idec have the opportunity to present their summer experiences during a poster session towards the end of August.  I’ve always opted to present my findings at the end of the summer, and this summer will be no exception.  Work has begun on the poster already, and I’ll also be making a slideshow for a mid-August department presentation.

For years, I was told variations on, “In statistics, your terminal degree will determine the playing field for your career.  With a bachelor’s degree, you’ll be in a completely supportive role, performing relatively trivial but nonetheless important tasks under a fair amount of supervision.  With a master’s degree, you can be associated with interesting projects and make valuable contributions to the team efforts with more freedom, but you won’t be making any of the big decisions.  With a Ph.D., you finally get to take the reins and call the shots.”  Working in a corporation with a master’s degree has really proven this point to be true.  The project that I’m working with is very interesting, I can visibly see how my contributions are furthering the team effort, and I’m allowed to solve problems how I see fit.  I’ve even made a couple of suggestions for analyses we could perform, plots that would be interesting to examine, etc.  At the end of the day, though, my supervisor and her peers are making the bigger decisions for me.  This arrangement is fine for the time being, because they’re much more qualified to be making those decisions, but ultimately I’d like to be playing at their level.  Any doubts about the worth of getting my Ph.D. were wiped out this past month.  Fall 2010 Ph.D. programs, here I come.

In slightly nerdier news, I figured out an R mystery that’s been bugging my for years: how to use a loop index dynamically in variable names.  I’ve found myself wanting to do this a couple of times in the last few years, and I figured it out on Friday.  As a simple example, let’s say we wanted to use a loop to create the following vectors with an obvious should-be-loopable pattern:

vector_1 = (1 2 3 4)

vector_2 = (2 3 4 5)

vector_3 = (3 4 5 6)

Having discovered the paste() function earlier this summer, I thought that would be my answer, but doing something like:

for (k in 1:3){

paste(“vector_”, k, sep=“”) <- k: (k+3) # you can’t assign a vector to a string!

}

fails because you’re trying to assign a numeric vector to a string.  However, there’s a nice function called assign() that makes this possible:

for (k in 1:3){

assign(paste(“vector_”, k, sep=“”) , k: (k+3))   # but the assign function can!

}

Using ls() to look at the current variables, we see that we now have our vectors with their desired values.  (end nerdy news)

On Friday night, I headed over to the Museum of Science for their Friday night summer stargazing series with a friend of mine, Anna.  The weather on Friday was absolutely perfect (high of 72 and sunny during the day, mid-50s and clear at night), which made for great stargazing.  We saw the planetarium show first, where I had a chance to get in touch with my inner 7 year old, and then we headed up onto the roof of the parking garage (but not before having some fun in the gift shop).  Even if there wasn’t any stargazing, the sunset from the top of the garage was incredible (picture doesn’t really do it justice).  But there was stargazing, and due to the planetarium show and the helpful employees on the roof, we actually knew what we were looking at!  While waiting in line for the telescope, we managed to find the Summer Triangle, the North Star, Cassiopeia, and Arcturus.  Once we fought our way into the telescope, we got to see Saturn along with Titan, which was really cool.  I wonder how it must have felt to see Saturn’s rings for the first time?

On Saturday, I got together with Julia, a good friend of mine, to play one of my favorite board games: Boggle!  One of my favorite iPod Touch apps is Scramble, essentially generic Boggle but with online multiplayer.  Scramble is a great way to get good at Boggle because, at the end of every round, you get a list of every word that was on the board and can see them highlighted on the board.  I usually play Scramble online and place in the Top 3 pretty consistently, but it’s so much more fun when you’re playing with people in real life.  And Saturday was no exception… I’m definitely going to have to play more regularly with Julia and anyone else in the Somerville/Cambridge/Boston area who plays Scrabble but isn’t too serious about it.

On Sunday, I headed over to Harvard Square for Sunday brunch with a friend of mine at Veggie Planet, a restaurant that came highly recommended to me from a fellow Somerville vegetarian.  I really enjoyed the place, very down-to-earth and college-y.  The live music was a nice touch for brunch, and the food was very good and reasonably (cheaply) priced.  After eating, we headed over to the Coop and spent some time looking through books before walking around Harvard Square and the Harvard Campus.  After brunch, Anna and I headed over to the harbor to catch the last day of the Tall Ships at Sail Boston 2009.  We spent the afternoon wandering around the docks, and even managed to find our way onboard a couple of really nice boats.  (She took all of this week’s pictures, thanks, Anna!)  I’d love to sail around the world, and if I don’t find a job for the fall, I just might…