senior year

just started watching The Hours with roommate... looks like it should be good.

the penn state game just ended. More than anything, I wanted to post from seeing lincoln tower in the background at the beginning of the game. the lincoln tower part of my osu life is really over (and has been), and my whole osu life will be completed in short order. well, done at least, hopefully complete.

I spent much of today working to try to push that towards the "complete" end. at the ling department (I have a key now as a grad student) I chatted with a grad in syntax about linguistics, worked on my NSF app, and sent a longish email to a prof at Edinburgh in scotland I'd like to work with for my Ph.D. At the end I asked her about writing me a letter of recommendation for my NSF app. I heard from someone yesterday that it's a good mark to have a rec letter from the putative host institution.

haha, which brings me to yesterday. Nothing big, just gave a talk about my NSF research proposal along with two other grads at Clippers, the comp ling discussion group. I went last and started about eight minutes before the end of the group meeting. Almost everyone stayed about 15 minutes over, which is presumably good? It's hard to read people's expressions... audience members usually look slightly constipated during these presentations. I did my best to be animated during my explanation and sort of felt like a dancing elf.

Tomorrow I'll need to be up early-ish. Some classmates from my computational semantics class are meeting at 3 to work on homework, and I'd like to have most of it done by then.

With grad school apps etc., this is definitely one of the most stressful quarters I've had. But, as research is going well and it is directly tied to what I most want to do, it's also one of the more rewarding ones. It's nice to know that research is something that so reliably pays dividends when I put time and energy into it.

If I do go to Edinburgh, I think my PhD. is only supposed to take three years. That just makes me think: really? PhD at 25? The reason is that PhDs in Europe are different from the US. They are purely research and do not include course work, requiring in every case a masters degree. Because of my APs in high school, I was able to finish the BA/MA a year ahead of time. If my PhD is solid and sets me up for a long career at a stable well-supported tenure track position, then I think the decisions that have begun in high school will have been worth it.

time to focus on watching the hours. later.

-=-raptur-=-