The adventure started in San Francisco. After touching down, I hopped onto BART for a lengthy but mostly above-ground train ride around the bay to Downtown Berkeley. Emerging from the train station after a long day of traveling without much food, I stumbled into the first restaurant I found: a casual little corner joint that served burgers, fries, and shakes made using natural, high-quality ingredients. I scarfed down a cheeseburger (no bun) and made a mental note to myself about the place in case I needed something quick and easy during the next couple of days. This note was quickly erased: during the 20-minute walk to my hotel, I passed approximately 23987231 casual little corner joints that served burgers, fries, and shakes made using natural, high-quality ingredients. They’re everywhere! Still, it was a nice walk over. Berkeley is a pretty town, with lots of bikers, sunlight, and greenery:

I found my hotel, which was cutely college-themed: the room service request form looked like a Scantron sheet, the shower curtain had SAT vocab words on it, and the local directory was in the style of a three-ring binder. And in my brief survey of the room, I picked up the price sheet for food and saw that, in addition to the $9 Reeses Cups and $15 mini bar options, there were $275 bong-inspired lamps. Welcome to Berkeley.

I dropped off my bags and embarked on a walking tour of the campus. After the urban sprawl of Boston University, anything coherent feels good, but the UC Berkeley campus is gorgeous. I don’t know enough about architecture to comment on what I saw, but I could totally spend the next few years here. It didn’t hurt that the campus was being bathed in my first California sunset, either. Check it out:

Monday was a busy day of welcomes, information sessions, meals with students/professors, social events, etc. I got a nice jump on the day by waking up at 4AM Berkeley time. After getting some breakfast at a local diner a few hours later, I still had some time to kill, so I started walking east and stumbled across this trail leading up to the top of a hill. 10 minutes of walking/jogging later, I was greeted with a slightly gray/foggy but still nice view of the bay.

Anyway, back to the welcomes. It was a long day, full of interesting and relevant information. A few points:

• The other ~10 prospective students were all cool, interesting people. When we went around the table at our first introductory meeting, there were some common themes that emerged in peoples’ interests: music, boardgames, and outdoor activities. This is my kind of crowd.
• I had been very worried that the current graduate students (and prospectives) would be math robots. While I’m sure that everyone I met was great at math, they were all smart, well-spoken, social people. They even did things other than statistics sometimes! Again, outdoor activities like hiking, kayaking, climbing, and running seemed popular. And eating.
• The program seems well thought out, and seems to take about 5 years. The first year is spent doing mostly coursework with some seminars and group meetings thrown in there to get you thinking about research topics. The second year is more coursework with some electives and your first teaching/assisting/research opportunities. After passing the oral qualifying exam in year 2-3, it’s onto research.
• As the day progressed, I kept asking myself, “Wait, they’re going to pay me to come here and study/research with these people? I get to actually work on these projects?” It seemed almost too good to be true. I felt totally at home with these people, and could really see myself fitting well into the department.

Tuesday was a short day, with four 30-minute interviews with faculty members. I met with Professors Nielsen, Wainwright, Song, and van der Laan, and had interesting conversations with all of them about their research, opportunities for getting involved, and the Berkeley Statistics PhD experience. Though the short windows weren’t really enough time to get into deep conversations, I think there would be no shortage of brilliant people doing interesting, relevant research projects at Berkeley.

And then, almost as quickly as it had started, my Berkeley adventure came to an end. Thankfully, there was a station wagon waiting to whisk me off to my next adventure… coming next week!

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.

A lot of people were talking about the weather being bipolar this week, but it seemed pretty consistently cold and miserable to me. It was good practice for the “biking in the cold/rain/snow” experience that awaits me, though; now I know what I need to buy to get ready. I picked up a fender yesterday to counter the spray coming off the streets, but much more important to Hoxie Happiness is going to be a good pair of biking pants. My current strategy is to wear shorts and bundle up on top, but this results in a sweaty upper body and frozen-solid shins. (I was hoping my body would take the average, but no luck so far.) Wearing a hat under my helmet seems to do a good job of providing warmth and protecting my upper ears from the wind, but I’m eyeing this for maximum facial protection and ninja appearance.

I had some fun this week, too. On Wednesday night, I rode over to the Sunset Grill in Allston for an unofficial incomplete Pine Crest Class of 2005 reunion. In attendance at various parts of the evening were myself, Joel Lewis, Sam Cohen, Christina Fernandez, Courtney White, Alex Bassett, Courtney Caliendo, and Sara Lanes. It was great to see everyone and find out how close people are to me: Christina works next door at the Broad Institute and Sara is right down the street at Harvard Law, for example. I’m looking forward to seeing these guys again sometime soon.

I also decided to get back into the salsa swing of things this week, so I attended the Intermediate BU Lesson yesterday. It was intense! In the good old days, we’d do a nice 20-minute warmup of basic steps, side steps, basic turns, etc. Then we’d learn a little partnered routine and practice that for a few minutes before going on our merry way. Now that BU has an official competition team and beginner lessons dedicated to the easy stuff, though, we hit the ground running with a complicated individual pattern and music no slower than 120 bpm. I was in the back row and couldn’t really see what the instructor was doing, plus it had been more than a month since my last salsa experience, so I was struggling. (At one point, I was the only person in the room facing right while everyone else faced left. Oops.) Twenty minutes into the lesson, just as I was starting to lose faith, I was saved by the bell: the fire alarm went off!

After evacuating the building, we reconvened and jumped into the partnered routine, also complicated but more doable. I was learning the routine with two girls, Christine and Dina, who were both equally talented and forgiving of my rustiness, and it was looking pretty decent by the end of the hour. Putting the individual footwork and the partnered routine together was really neat, as they’re usually presented as unrelated entities. At the end of the lesson, I got recruited for the BU competition team, but as a graduate, I don’t think I’m allowed to compete. Still, I’m looking forward to the lessons on Saturday afternoons and will definitely be attending again.

With the Mathematics GRE behind me, I can now focus my energy on getting graduate school apps ready to go. A few personal statements are in “edited draft” mode, so I’m going to send them out to some friends for feedback. Other schools need some more work, but that’s what the next month is for!

Professor Hall approached me about a month before the ceremony and asked me to give a “short, happy” speech. As long as it was brief and upbeat, I could talk about anything I chose to. Free reign for presentations is a great thing, but it also meant that I needed to put some thought into an appropriate topic. Friends of mine suggested that I “let epsilon be greater than 0″ and somehow prove that we’d all be happy, successful people in five years. Since most of the members of the audience would probably be of the non-math variety, though, I tried to find a more universal topic that would appeal to everyone. (Besides, that proof sounds non-trivial at best.)

Seeking inspiration, I turned to my list of books I’ve read recently and came upon Not Quite What I Was Planning. This book is a collection of six-word memoirs written by a few celebrities but mostly by ordinary people and submitted online to SMITH Magazine. When I read this book in April, I was blown away by the amount of emotion people managed to pack into their six words. Flipping through page after page of smart, funny, witty, regretful, or deep memoirs forced me to think about my own life, both thus far and in the future, and at six words each, the “brevity” aspect of my speech was under control. I thought that I could draw an appropriate amount of interesting, funny, and insightful material from this theme, so I wrote and memorized a speech that included a few of my favorite memoirs, a couple of my own creations, and some encouraging words on setting and achieving goals in the future.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how the speech would be received. I didn’t share the text with any of my friends or family, and because my parents were in town all weekend, I didn’t have a lot of time to rehearse during the few days leading up to the speech. However, I really enjoy public speaking and thought the text turned out well, so I was optimistic going into it. After Professor D’Agostino’s opening remarks and introduction, up I went to the podium, where I delivered what I thought was a very good rendition of the speech. The audience seemed to enjoy it, too; one of my own six word memoirs was “Math graduation speaker receives standing ovation” and they actually gave me a standing ovation when I finished! The rest of the ceremony flew by in a blur, and by 11 AM, I was holding my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mathematics and the College Prize for Excellence in Statistics. What a thrill!

I was ready to declare victory with the speech, but less than 36 hours later, I received a Facebook message from Rachel Fershleiser, one of the co-authors of Not Quite What I Was Planning. She heard via a Google Alert and this blog post that I had given a speech referencing her book, and she wanted to learn more about the speech. We exchanged messages and I sent her a copy of the text, which she seemed to really enjoy. As of now, she’d like to publish the speech, and it will be interesting to see how this turns out!