Statistically Significant

Another week in the life of Hoxie.

I had a great week at work. On Monday, I finished version 1.0 of a piece of software I’ve been working part-time for the last couple of months. It’s an R program that does a lot of the initial data cleaning and processing steps in the genome-wide association studies that we do. After writing very similar code for both my rheumatoid arthritis project this summer and my current project, it made a lot of sense to develop a standardized, streamlined, computationally efficient code base to draw from in the future, and that’s what I’ve tried to create here. It’s about 1500 lines of R code with six or seven additional functions that I wrote, and it even comes with a user manual and a miniature data set that works from start to finish. There’s still more work to be done on it, but it’s been great experience working on it so far, and I think it’s going to save us a lot of time and aggravation down the road. I presented the pipeline to the translational medicine team on Friday, and it was well-received, so that’s exciting.

As a contractor, I don’t have vacation or sick days (but I do get paid for overtime!). I haven’t gotten sick yet this year, but with the holidays coming up, I’m going to be taking a little bit of time off. This past week, I booked plane tickets home for the week leading up to Christmas and bus tickets to New York City for Thanksgiving with the NYC Silsbees. It’s going to be great to get out of the city for a little while on both occasions, and I’m psyched to finally be partaking in the Annual Great New York City Thanksgiving Extravaganza that I’ve been hearing about for years. More details and pictures to follow, but it’s going to be a blast!

Yesterday, I rode downtown in the rain to run some errands, including stopping off at the Verizon store to get my cell phone fixed. While I was waiting for a customer service guy to check warranty information and process my repair, I was chatting with another customer service rep about the Eris she was playing with. She was really exciting about the concept of an “App Store,” where you can, like, download programs that people have written and use them on your portable computing device! She proudly showed me “your screen is fogged up and you can trace in the fog with your finger” app, and I was suddenly transported to, oh, a year ago when I downloaded that on my iPod Touch. I’ve always thought that the Touch and the iPhone are two of the coolest gizmos ever created, but the conversation drove home how ahead of the game Apple was with the iPhone and how behind the rest of the world was/is. I don’t think that the Droid is going to kill the iPhone, but it seems like a pretty cool toy.

Today was a really productive day. With Duke submitted last weekend, I have 4 weeks to get my Berkeley, Harvard, UNC Chapel Hill, and Wisconsin applications ready. I’ve got some busy weekends coming up, though, so I spent most of the day banging away at them. I finished and submitted Wisconsin (2 down, 6 to go) and am almost done with Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill. (I was working on Berkeley this week, so I wanted to take a break from that). The end is definitely in sight for the grad school process… a couple more weekends of getting things done and I’ll be there.