11/02/09 – 11/08/09
November 8th, 2009
Another week in the life of Hoxie.
This was one of the more exhausting weeks I’ve had in recent memory. Productive but draining.
Before work on Wednesday, I rode down to the Boston University School of Public Health to meet with Professor Josee Dupuis, who is the wife of my adviser at BU (Eric Kolaczyk), the PhD adviser of my supervisor at work, the ex-coworker of my supervisor’s supervisor at work, and a key player in securing my summer internship at Biogen Idec. (It’s a small world.) As I’m preparing grad school applications and thinking about the shape I’d like my career to take, I’ve been tracking down successful people in the field to hear their story, and Josee seemed like an obvious choice. We talked for the better part of an hour about her background, statistics in industry vs. academia, the past, present, and future of statistical genetics, the Stanford PhD program (she earned her PhD there in 1994) and programming languages. It was a very interesting talk, full of short-term things to include in applications and long-term things to think about. I really appreciate the time she gave me.
Wednesday afternoon was my big presentation, and it went very well. I was a little intimidated (most of the people in attendance are senior scientists who have been doing this stuff for years), but once I started talking, everything flowed nicely. There were a few good questions, which tells me that people actually understood the material. Chunyu and I are approaching the problem from a different angle (via host statistical genetics) than many of the people on the project are, so it’s always nice when people understand what we’re doing.
Continuing my quest for conversations with successful scientists and statisticians, I had lunch with the head of non-clinical biostatistics at Biogen Idec on Friday. He worked at the Harvard School of Public Health for a few years before coming to Biogen Idec to do clinical trial work, so he was a valuable resource for insight into academia, government, and industry. He seems to think that I’d be happiest in academia, but I think it’s just too early to tell. Still, it was an enlightening conversation.
Speaking of grad school applications, I submitted my Duke app earlier this afternoon. One down, seven to go. Next on the calendar are Berkeley, Harvard, UNC, and Wisconsin. They aren’t due until mid-December, but I’m going to try to get them done in the next couple of weeks. It looks like I’m going to NYC for Thanksgiving weekend and a friend of mine is going to be staying with me while doing med school interviews in early December, so the sooner I can cross these off the list, the better.
