The End of the World As We've Known It (For the Past Four Years)

Last Tuesday, I walked across a rainy stage in the middle of a sea of umbrellas to be handed a rolled-up little piece of paper that said I had graduated. Actually, that particular paper was more along the lines of "Thanks for coming to the ceremony," but we all knew what it stood for.

I realized just how many people I've never met in my own major, in my own emphasis. Berkeley is a tough place to make friends in academic settings, in part because the class size is often quite big. Despite that, I befriended the person seated next to me. It turns out she's going to be at Stanford next year as well!

However big the world may seem, it's really rather small.

And thank goodness for that, because going out into the world is a scary thought. I am so glad to have my family and friends providing a circle of support. I've been working on being proactive in spending time with my friends, and I'm going to do my best to stay in touch with them after graduation as well.

This post was supposed to be about graduation and how when I lamented that it was raining only the three days of my roommates' and my graduations, my friend told me to think of it this way: Berkeley is sad to see us go.

Instead, it became about my friends and family. People who sat through the rain for the ceremony, risked their cameras in the rain during the receptions, and cared enough to ignore the cold and tell me congratulations.

My message for my fellow graduates, then:
It's the people around you that make life worth living. Keep them close when you move out into the world, because they will keep you happy - and sane.

Thesis

Trying to write my honors thesis when all I want to do is sit out in the sun. Damn California weather.

Posters

I can't really spare much focus for a post right now, because I'm trying to finish up a scientific poster for the MCB honors poster session on Friday. Re-organizing my thoughts about what I've been doing for the past year and putting it back in context is a bit tough. It's looking pretty good right now, but I have to send it to my PI (who is out of town) and hope I have enough time to make the corrections that I know she will suggest. The poster, of course, needs to be printed, which means that I need to be done with it by tomorrow night at the latest. Oh man, where'd the time go?

Grad Interviews

Berkeley's on the semester system, so school starts on Tuesday, Jan 18th for me. If my New Year's Resolution were to go to all my classes this semester, I would fail within two days. Not because I'm lazy, but because I have grad school interview weekends that often start Thursday or Friday.

So I understand having interviews Thursday/Friday means professors at the school don't have to come in on Saturdays and Sundays, but for me, it means I won't be going to my Friday class for at least 6 weeks in a row. On at least 5 of those weeks, I'm going to be missing all my Thursday classes as well. And sometimes the Wednesday ones too, for those on the East Coast (and also UCSD). Wouldn't be so bad flying in the other direction, but I have to start 3 hours earlier here.

I still have one class I need for my major, a class I need in order to graduate. And I'm going to be missing almost 1/3 of the lectures for that class. I really have to talk to the professor too, because I recall correctly, the midterms for that class tend to be Thursday nights. Lovely.

So I'm flying across the country every other weekend, interviewing within California the other weekends, missing classes I'll have to catch up on, including one for my major, and trying to do research for my honors thesis at the same time. And I don't even get to go home every couple weekends to recharge.

I think I understand now why so many people take a year off. Here's my suggestion to future grad school applicants: even if you know what you want to study, and that you want to go to grad school, think hard on when to apply. If you're applying to a bunch of places that you think you have a pretty good chance of getting in to, and you still have requirements to fulfill during your last semester, it might be to your benefit to wait. Find an internship or a job for 6 months or a year, and apply the following spring.

Fate of the Updates

We played this song in band in middle school, and for some reason, I remembered it today. It's pretty epic, and pretty too. I don't remember if I played first or second flute, but I think I still have a copy of it in my music folder at home.



Now that I have bribed you with a song, I apologize for the infrequent posts of late (please put down that tomato!). I have returned to the USA, but my frequency of posting is still not very high. Mea culpa.

Right now, though, I'm trying to focus on studying for my GREs. I have a month before the General test and 6 weeks before the Biochem subject test, but I have a whole lot of material to cover for the Biochem test and I'm pretty sure I won't have nearly as much time a week from now.

Hell, I'm busy already. School started Thursday and I had a Japanese vocabulary quiz on Friday. Not review, but new words. Tomorrow (Monday), I have a kanji quiz, with a whole new set of kanji as well. Once we get into the listening quizzes, oral quizzes, written quizzes as well as reading homework, grammar homework, and kanji homework, it's going to get even busier.

Plus, because I can't bear the thought of dropping either one, I'm taking two language classes! Intermediate Telugu and Intermediate Japanese. This, in addition to Mammalian Neuroanatomy, the Psychology of Sleep, the Global Poverty reflection course for my practice (which only meets every other week), research, yongmudo, and salsa is probably a bit much...

It's okay, I'll take Telugu P/NP.

This is the Final Countdown!

I went to Berkeley to move my stuff back into my apartment, and it was a seriously gorgeous day. I finally reunited with my roomie and another friend after 2.5 months, which made me very happy. I got to meet our new roommate, who seems very sweet, so I'm excited for the year to come.

More than anything, though, it's difficult to believe that I'm a senior. I mean, has it really been 3 years since I was one of those clueless freshmen registering at Unit 2 and struggling to get all my boxes onto a cart and up the elevator? 3 years since I first began living away from home? 3 years since I left high school and a little bit of my shyness behind?

Has it really been 2 years since I moved into an apartment and had to start cooking (or microwaving) food? 2 years since I started living with my friend from middle school and her two high school friends who I had never met?

Do I really only have one more year with all these wonderful people before I go off to grad school or TeachForAmerica or a year working at Genentech or some other company?

I guess so.

Better make the most of it.

Oh Standardized Testing...

So I signed up for the GRE. Two of them, actually. I'm going to take the General test at the end of September, and the Subject test in Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology in October. Fun stuff. I bought myself a Princeton Review book for the General test (since that's what worked best for me with the SATs), but there are a total of 0 books for the Biochem test.

Seriously.

Kaplan makes a book for the Biology GRE, but there are pretty much none for Biochem. Apparently, it is meant to cover what you would normally learn in undergraduate coursework. So that means I need to go back through my Lehninger and find some textbooks on molecular biology and genetics (especially genetics, because I have yet to take a genetics class - that's scheduled for next spring).

At any rate, this means I have more work to do than I realized, so I'd better get started...
. Lucky for me, the e-book is still working even though it's been more than 1 year. I just need it to work for 1 more month until I can get home to my actual, physical version of the book.

Saving the World

I usually try to post at least every couple days, but I've been AWOL for a little while. Let me tell you the reason. Within a week's time, I'm going to be leaving for India. I'm going there of course to visit family, but I have a second reason as well.

We have a minor at Berkeley called Global Poverty & Practice. It's not like most minors. You do take your 4-5 classes, but that's not enough. You have to do a practice. Something in real life. You're supposed to go out into the world and help alleviate poverty (or at least learn about it first-hand so that you can do the real work soon in the future with knowledge of what kinds of things are going on). They encourage you to go abroad, and that's just what I'm doing.

The students in the minor are involved in a diverse range of projects, from self-led to student-run to NGO-directed. From creating crops for sustenance farming to helping medical teams service remote villages to fighting disease in urban slums. And me? I'm going to be working in education. My practice project is going to be improving science education in a couple of rural schools by making it more interactive.

Sometimes when I hear myself talk about it in comparison to all these other things people are doing, I wonder if it seems like my project is much too narrowly focused. But, to paraphrase and contextualize the Pareto principle, 80% of the problems come from 20% of the causes. You just have to pick the right 20% to fix. There was a study done in rural China that showed how the presence of a science lab in a school, even after controlling for financial differences and student self-selection, was correlated with students attending school for 1.8 more years. If a little science lab can encourage some interest and keep students in school, isn't it worth having?

At any rate, I've been working on finding/modifying/writing lab protocols, lessons, and questions for some of the simple experiments I've picked. I'll go into more detail later, but I should also let you know: I'm planning on creating a new blog for me to talk about my project while I'm there. I won't abandon this one of course, but all posts to do with that experience will probably go there (and possibly be duplicated here). More info will come when I've decided what exactly to do. Ciao for now!

My Future

I've been looking at grad schools this week. Which ones have the best neuroscience graduate programs, what do I need for their application, what's the curriculum and rotation schedule like, etc. There's some obvious ones, like UCSD, UCSF, UCLA, UC Berkeley...but I don't really know much about those outside sunny California. Except Columbia.

I really, really want to go to Columbia. What I like is that their program is very interdisciplinary, but still well established. And they have Professor Eric Kandel! He literally wrote the (8 lb.) book!

The Kandel book, as it is called, despite the presence of two other authors on the cover.

Still, there's one other thing that I've been thinking about. I was tipped off about this program last spring, when someone came into my History of India class and spoke about it. Since then, I've heard of it from multiple other sources, and done some research for myself. One of my roommates is also going to be doing it beginning next (school) year. It's called TeachForAmerica.

The program selects the best and brightest undergraduates to teach in schools in underserved areas for two years. And it's highly competitive. This year, it got some 35,000 applicants and accepted about 4,000 to train and send off into the education world. Something like 10% of the Harvard graduating class applies to this program. What are the chances I will get in?

If by some chance I do make the cut, I have to think about how I will deal with grad school. Grad school is definitely my goal - I want to do research. This is something I've been working for since high school, and it's really my dream. But I've had a charmed life. I've been extremely lucky. I want to spread some of that to kids who haven't had what I grew up with, to help make their lives better and open up all of the opportunities waiting for them in the future. This is also something I really want to do.

The ideal situation would be getting into a graduate program that will allow me to defer for two years, get that teaching experience, and then return to studying the brain. TeachForAmerica is a well-known program, and they have arrangements with many schools to allow such deferrals. Neuroscience, however, is a pretty specific field, and I haven't seen any of those on the list on the website. So it falls to me. I need to call up each of the graduate schools that ends up on my semi-final list and see which ones would allow me to take 2 years before I begin. If none of my top schools will allow it, or if I don't get in to TFA? Then I guess I'll go straight to grad school and find another way to get kids interested in learning. Don't worry, I've got a few ideas on what to do in such a situation...

Explore Your World

I love exploring the campus. Freshman year, I tried to take a slightly different route to class each day (when I wasn't late, though that happened quite often). I could probably even list finding new spots to eat lunch as a hobby.

Having lived only on Southside in the dorms and in Downtown Berkeley (to the west of campus) in my apartment, I have little experience with Northside. The residential areas in general are quieter, greener, and prettier, and the north side of the campus (which, not being an engineer, I rarely visit), seems to follow that trend.

And you know what? There are a lot of things to see in Berkeley. Odd things, pretty things, weird things are strewn all over the campus (photos after the jump):

 Odd statues...

 Rainy courtyards...

Sunny courtyards with lovely trees...

Other trees transformed into lampposts...

And even, as per my most recent discovery, abandoned houses! Or at least, the front sides of abandoned houses.

So if you have a little time, maybe 10 minutes before class or after work, use it to explore the area around you. Take note of the little things, the odd things, the beautiful things. Bring some spice into your life!

The Berkeley Project (Pictures Added!)

I think most people would agree that community service is a worthwhile endeavor. Helping people, cleaning the city, improving others' quality of life - it can be a very altruistic act. Even those who are forced into it as punishment for wrongdoing are performing valuable services.

At the same time, however, it is one of those subjects that brings up in people the old crowd mentality. For the most part, no single person is responsible for the common areas in the neighborhood. When there is somebody in charge, she or he is unlikely to have the manpower (or peoplepower, rather) to get large-scale projects done. The members of the community who could provide that power are much too busy trying to live their own lives and solve their own problems. They simply don't have the time to volunteer.

The Berkeley Project tries to address this concern. It is a short-term (i.e., one day) mobilization of students to fix things all around the Berkeley area. In the fall, on BP Day, they get over 2000 volunteers divided up into teams with specific tasks at specific sites scattered throughout the city, where they work together with employees of the city and various service organizations.

This method provides the manpower for large tasks like repainting public buildings, or weeding and planting trees on road dividers, or even clearing trails in the Berkeley Hills. It allows students who wouldn't be able to make weekly commitments to not rule out community service as an option. Mainly, being so big, it raises awareness of the issue of service and the state of things in the community outside of the university area.

BP Month in the spring, on the other hand, is not quite as big. It's split into three weekends in March, with about 100 volunteers each Saturday. That's where I went today. Our team went to South Berkeley, where we weeded. And weeded. And planted some lovely plants. And ran into a variety of wildlife, including ladybugs, spiders, roly polies (pill bugs), swarms of ants, and even some centipedes. I don't think I've ever seen a centipede in America before.

 

Before: Pretty flowers can still be weeds, especially if they're overgrown. (All credit for the lovely photo goes to Catherine Lai)

Despite the multi-legged horrors, a bush stump that was as thick as a small tree, and the ridiculously obstinate grass in one corner (isn't grass supposed to have short roots?), we managed to efficiently extricate the weeds, to boldly go where a few centipedes have gone before, and even to save a few poor earthworms in the process. For all this work, we were paid in burritos, cookies, smiles, and thank yous from the passers by. Well worth the effort.

 

After: all weeded and ready for orderly growth, as befits a city planter. If I remember, I'll come back next year and take a photo after all the plants have grown out a bit. (Photo credit: Catherine Lai)

A Speech to Remember

As I was walking up Bancroft St. this afternoon, I found my way blocked by some policemen. They were allowing nobody to cross the street behind Zellerbach Hall. After I waited for a few minutes, a motorcade turned into the street. Police cars at either end flanked a couple of SUVs. I looked into the silver one and saw...

Are You Noteworthy?

Don’t worry, I’m not calling your worth into question.

Noteworthy is a UC Berkeley a cappella group (i.e., their vocals act as the background instruments) that somewhat recently went viral on the nets for their antics in their rendition of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face.

At any rate, one of the members is my roommate’s friend from Taekwondo (and boyfriend of our possible future roommate). And I only knew him from the context of Taekwondo. So imagine my shock when I saw him on Sproul, performing this:



I'm going to leave you hanging on which one he is, but to make up for that, I'll give you another video. They've got a few other gems, like this slightly-difficult-to-hear version of my favorite song from Mulan:



According to my inside sources, until the sudden spike in popularity of Poker Face, the boys were working on an arrangement for Bad Romance. So keep an eye out for that, and I'll let you know when they start performing it.

What's Up With All The Hearts?

Up until today (technically yesterday) I completely forgot it was Valentine’s Day. I didn’t really care, although I would rather have Clementine’s Day.

This year, it didn’t bother me to see everyone coupled up, my roommates returning to Berkeley early (despite the 3-day weekend!) to spend time with their boyfriends.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been keeping myself busy this semester with the things I love: neuroscience, labwork, martial arts, dance… who has time for boys?

Try To Feel Again

Are pictures of suffering still effective in raising emotions in our society? Have we all become desensitized by the images of violence and death and victimization we see everyday, on TV, on the internet?

Yes and no. I think pictures can still affect us. A picture of a single starving child is still much better at encouraging people to be generous than figures on the debilitating reach of malnourishment throughout the world.

But I think our attention spans have shortened to the point that we no longer think about what the pictures mean (I mean, this is why I use short paragraphs). This is not to say that we think or feel nothing. We feel our initial reaction, our gut instinct of awe or sadness or pity as our mind processes the situation represented by the picture. Look at this photograph:

What was your reaction upon seeing this photo? Mine was initially, 'Oh, another starving child, how sad.' My attention was divided between this and the text and what the professor was saying, but it still seems to provide support for the "we are desensitized" theory, right? As the picture continued to stay up on the Powerpoint, however, I kept looking at it. And then I saw the vulture. 

I was transfixed by horror. All I could think was 'Oh my god.'


But if the professor had put the picture on the screen and flipped to the next slide with a few words, leaving it up only for a few seconds, I wouldn't have understood the context. Then again though, isn't that the kind of environment we usually see these pictures in? On TV, with the anchor or a narrator speaking, and some sort of text every now and then, a quick flash of a picture in between to highlight the subject? Or online in an article, surrounded by text and flashing click-me ads?

Maybe we don't really look at the world around us anymore, and the same applies to these photographs. We're too engrossed in ourselves and the people around us, and even the world around us - but all in the form of our mental construction of these things. You could argue that everything we see is a mental construction, that's true, but my point is that we see what we expect to in pictures, not what's actually going on.


So I have an assignment for you. It's probably easiest to do online, when you have some control over the pictures you see. Next time you see a photograph that invokes some kind of gut reaction in you, stop and look more closely at it. Notice the details, ask where this was taken, who it was taken by, what the situation was, who the people are. Find out not just what the photographer took a picture of, but what she meant to show.

Being Busy Can Be Relaxing

I always think I like being busy until midterms hit. And then I always wonder, 'Why do I do this to myself?'

But the truth is, the busier I am, the more productive I am and the happier I am. Counterintuitive, neh? Let me explain. When I'm busy and I know it (clap my hands! *clap* *clap*), I procrastinate less. I know that I have way too many things to do and can't try to finish everything at the last minute.

I usually make a schedule of activities and homework and whatnot lest my God-like (read: holey) memory lets something slip. The difference when I'm busy is that I actually look at it. And then I follow it! Well, mostly. I usually build in some extra time for when I suspect things will not quite get done. So I get work done without waiting too long.

Photo credit: Roger Smith

My memory is like this, but in my brain. Anyways, this is actually a fistulated cow. The hole allows scientists to study digestive and other gastrointestinal processes.

What about the happier part? Well, part of my busy-ness is due to extracurricular activities. This semester, I'm doing as much as I can of the two I most enjoy - dancing and martial arts. On a more academic note, I'm doing research in a lab that works on a fascinating topic and is full of nice, fun people. So I get some social interaction and fun and I don't have to feel guilty about taking time off from studying because it's planned into my schedule.

The same applies when I finish tasks on time. I no longer have to feel guilty about spending some time with friends because there's nothing else planned in my schedule for the day. Unfortunately, I haven't done that yet today, so off I go to read some neurobiology and practice some kanji.

じゃ、また明日!
(See you tomorrow!)

The Other

A concept we learned about in my Global Poverty class (and high school history classes previous) was that of the "Other." Not the kind from the Nicole Kidman movie, although it does have a great plot twist, but the kind that's important in colonialism, development, and our conception of ourselves.

We tend to define ourselves as individuals and as a society by what we are not. We are civilized. What does that mean? It means we are not savages. We are modern, because we are moving beyond tradition.

It was a large part of colonialism. Imperialists (mainly Europeans) defined themselves as modern in comparison to the "native" people of the places they occupied. There had to be a standard for comparison. The native culture was to be kept in its traditional, "pure" form, as though in a museum.

The same thing occurs today with development, with anthropological and sociological studies of other countries. Unless you are originally from that country (and even then sometimes, because you are entering in a professional capacity), you see the place from an outsider perspective. You look at the differences between yourself and them, you other-ize the people whom you are studying or helping, because that's how you remember who you are. Wherever there are differences, unfortunately, there's a hierarchy.

One of the places this is most evident is in the status of women in the West. According to Lila Abu-Lughod, "it has been accepted that, at least in the modern West, women have been the other to men's self."¹ That's where feminism comes in, of course. "Feminism has been a movement devoted to helping women become selves and subjects rather than objects and men's others."

There are still difficulties, principally in the differences in experience between women in various situations, but the progress the movement has made is undeniable. The small things, the way men unconsciously (or consciously) see and treat women, however, are still there. I think that's because men still define themselves as not women. Men are not supposed to be girly, they can't cry in public, stay-at-home dads get less respect, etc. But all of those characteristics are social constructions anyway, so hopefully we can get rid of this divide.

The same applies in development work - if you're going out somewhere to help people in a "less developed" country, don't assume they're backwards. Don't assume their culture is unchanging. Don't assume they are completely different from you. Because they aren't.

---

¹ Abu-Lughod, L, Fox, RG (ed). (1991). "Writing Against Culture" from Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. School of American Research Press.

Like Black Friday Minus The Shopping

I was strolling down Bancroft a few days ago, when it was still raining. Intramural signups were set to begin sometime the next day.

Intramural sports are pretty popular at Berkeley. Limited teams + 25,000 undergraduates = difficult to get in.

As I passed the RSF, I saw a long line of tents under the overhang. These were all people waiting in line to sign up for an intramural sports team. Camping out! In the rain! Ridiculous.

Big Change

I was talking today with a friend who spent about a week of his winter break on a service trip. He went to the Honduras with Global Medical Brigades to help deliver medical care to rural areas. He asserted that it was in fact the best week of his life.

The one thing he said that stuck with me, though, was about how UC Berkeley really is unique as a foundation for change. The people on the brigade came from various majors, though many of them were, like me, in the Global Poverty & Practice minor. And they all managed to raise money and supplies, go somewhere where help was needed, and do something to change both their own world and that of the people they helped.

You look around here, in America, and where do you find names from Berkeley? Well, it's a prestigious university. They're teaching as professors, arguing the law in their own firms, heading biotech companies, making money as venture capitalists. And maybe you actually see more people from Ivy League colleges in those positions.

So where are they? A large portion of the people running the Global Brigades programs were Berkeley graduates.They're not quite so visible as a Harvard-educated President or a pair of Stanfordian internet entrepreneurs, but they're out there working on improving the lots of people whom we the privileged continually forget.

They have counterparts in organizations around the world. They're the ones who are going to bring about the Millennium Development Goals and save the environment one plastic bag at a time. And they learned it here, they either gained or strengthened the drive to help here, at Berkeley. It's amazing to think that these people I'm meeting, my friends and classmates, will soon be out there making the difference themselves, and bringing Berkeley's spirit of social change to the world.

Anatomy and Protests

Okay, anatomy was relatively easy. Except the final was a fiasco. The professor couldn’t get the projector working for the histology identifications, so it took over an hour before we could go back to the first 10 questions. Then it was too bright, so she turned off the lights. And then we couldn’t see our papers, and she kept flipping back and forth, and people were talking, etc. Didn’t feel like a final at all.

I have more to say, though, so oh well, there goes my 75 words.

The protests are still going on. On Friday, the police arrested some 60 people who were in Wheeler Hall to prevent them from entering locked classrooms and throwing an all-night hip-hop party that might disturb finals the next day (like anatomy). Well, quite a few of those in Wheeler were simply students who happened to be there, studying for finals because the hall was open 24 hours.

The next night, while we were in the anatomy chatroom on bspace (which basically hosts all the course websites), asking and answering questions, someone mentioned that she heard people marching past her house. Everyone just said they hoped that there wouldn’t be any protests during our final, and forgot about it.

In the morning, I found out what happened. According to the Daily Cal, close to midnight on Friday, a bunch of protestors marched to Chancellor Birgeneau’s house (which is inside the campus), carrying torches. No, nothing was burned, but they did vandalize the outside of the house. 8 of the 40-75 people in the original group were arrested, but only 2 of them were UC Berkeley students.

I hope nobody will take this as a reflection on the rest of the Open University protestors, because they are not affiliated. It really was as Governor Schwarzenegger said (though I hate to agree with him), “an act of terrorism.”