July 30, 2004 Archives

la la la

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posted by catherine / July 30, 2004 / 2 comments /

since my mind is in no state to be making any larger posts about like, world peace, the dnc convention, or how good that sandwich i had for lunch was, i'm just doing the bullet point thing today. like little bite-sized nuggets of worthlessness.

  • tommy and i signed up to take the GRE next friday. the couple that takes the GRE together, has panic attacks together.

  • however, we also had a really fantastic restaurant week dinner at yanyu last wednesday. i'd certainly recommend it for anybody looking for awesome, really expensive asian food. the highlight was the duck (i've come to the conclusion that duck is my favorite meat, even more so than lamb) and the honey-roasted sea bass. and the banana fritters for dessert? who knew fried bananas could be so kick-ass good? with my love of all things fried, i should have suspected.

  • my bloggage may be metamorphisizing into something more legit come later this summer or early this fall. it's exciting! i hate being all teasy-secret (oh, who am i kidding? i LOVE it), but i'll probably be able to say more after my family vacation.

  • yay family vacation! we're going to some beach called stone harbor in lovely new jersey. we had wanted to go back up to rockport, mass., but that's like a 9 hour drive and it was just too much. stone harbor sounds pretty nice. seems all quaint and natural and stuff. anyway, i'll be gone from august 7-12, so don't let anything too fun happen while i'm gone.

  • gotta run 16 miles tomorrow for training. i am officially terrified. this is the longest i have ever run. i am going to fall over and/or vomit on my fellow runners.

  • but in other good news, my coworker shannon and i finally hit up our work colleagues for fundraising, and they are being surprisingly generous. turns out lots of people have their own personal connections to cancer, and hearing them makes the whole fundraising and race even more meaningful to me.

    and with that, i am out early because summer at my company means never having to do anything, especially because your bosses are doing even less than you are. peace out my peeps. have a great weekend.

    • ever vigilant

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    posted by tom / July 30, 2004 / 4 comments /

    Catherine and I finally pulled the trigger and registered for the GRE. Next Friday is the fateful day. I feel like a weight has been lifted -- it can't be that bad, right?

    Luckily enough, I've immediately found an new, heavier, replacement weight: the GRE Subject Test. Pretty much every program I'm considering applying to wants you to take one, although they frequently don't tell you exactly which one. Biology, Cellular Biology and Computer Science are the best candidates, both for myself and the programs I'm interested in. The question is, which will I fail least spectacularly?

    My major was Cognitive Science, which, while it encompasses all of these things, doesn't put me in a great position to take any of them. Right now CS is the frontrunner, primarily because a) it's shorter than the others b) a good chunk is just unusually boring logic questions c) the rest is definitions and d) I'm unlikely to be able to answer any bio question that doesn't involve neurons. The online study advice for each subject seems to either be "buy our miracle test taking strategy! $40!" or "consider obtaining an undergraduate degree in this field". It's a nice idea, and November is still a ways away, but that probably still only gives me enough time to memorize half of the fucking Kreb's Cycle.

    Normally I'd just bring my pathetic case to Jeff and Marie, my oracles for all things graduate-schooly. However, as Chemical Engineers, their choice of subject test was pretty well self-evident. And also they're, you know, smart. So the whole blind panic thing is probably not a subject on which they can offer authoritative advice.

    So what about you guys? Anybody taken a subject GRE, or know someone who has? How do the scores stack up against the general GRE? Do schools lean on subject tests heavily for admissions, or are they closer to the SAT II's -- a nice application bonus, but used primarily to determine what classes you need to brush up on? Finally, anybody taken one of these things and walked away thinking a respectable score could be obtained with well-directed cramming?

    jesus christ

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    posted by tom / July 30, 2004 / 4 comments /

    I think I just saw Wonkette interviewing Matthew Yglesias on MTV.

    Where am I?

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