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.

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.