Statistically Significant

Hello, Faithful Readers! This week was a week of transitions on all fronts.

At work, I finished up my summer project (building predictive models for rheumatoid arthritis based on SNP data using R and UNIX scripting) with a poster session last week and a 30-minute presentation to my department on Tuesday. I had ample time to prepare for the presentation and was genuinely excited about the research and results, so it came off well. I started a new project on Thursday, and I’m looking forward to it!

At home, I’ve been getting used to the new neighborhood by going for walks after work. My new apartment is right by a public park and a school’s athletic fields, so there are always people milling around, playing in the park, walking their dogs, etc. After the torrential downpour of yesterday, I went out for a walk and ended up playing with 4 neighborhood dogs in the park. None of them were quite as cute as Dante, but it was a perfectly acceptable substitute.

Socially, the city is starting to fill up with college kids again. This Onion article wandered into my RSS reader the other day, and it’s the truth: Boston is a college town. Now that I’m on the north side of the river, I’m hoping to meet some Harvard/MIT kids and have some fun with them this year. That said, this is going to be the first September in 19 years that I didn’t start a new school year. Weird. I’m pretty good at being a student, although being a young professional has worked out well so far. Besides, I’ll be a student again soon enough. This summer absolutely flew by, and I have no doubt that this next year is going to be over before I know it.