This one's for Christian

(He's a theater/media arts major)

(h/t to graphjam.com)

Where I'm at application-wise

So, I ended up applying initially to 9 schools: Washington, Oregon, Stanford, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Ohio State, Johns Hopkins, and Duke. All but Washington asked for a secondary application (no big surprise as I have no ties to the state). I have filled out secondary apps for everyone except Duke, Colorado, and Arizona, and hope to finish Duke within the week. I probably won't finish the applications for CO and AZ because they each want $100 to process the application, and I don't feel strongly enough about going to either of them.

I interviewed at Utah a few weeks ago and have an interview scheduled at Ohio State in late November. Unfortunately, they scheduled for right around Thanksgiving, so airfare is a little higher than I would like it to be. Oh well. One of my old roommates offered transport and a place to crash out there, for which I'm grateful.

Still just waiting to hear back from Oregon, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford. A post in the near future will talk a little more about my interview experience.

P.S. Anyone know of any good deals on airfare? What do you use when you are traveling to get the best deal? My interview is on a Monday morning--is a particular day or time most conducive to cheaper tickets?

The only good use of autotune

I found this video today, and it made me really happy inside. For those who don't know, autotune is a cop out to make people who are not musically talented sound like they are. :) Basically it's meant to "fix" small off-key slip ups. A lot of artists overuse it, and then they don't have to sing well, because the machine does it for them. Case in point, the scientists in this video are simply speaking, yet this sounds like it could be on a hip hop or electronica station.

Med School Application Process

One day short of two months with no posts. The paucity of posts is explained by the fact that I have been busy between school, work, and applications. Here I'm going to give a basic rundown of the application process for med school.

Back in May I took the MCAT, which is the admission exam for medical school. The next step of the process was to fill out the primary application, which is a basic, centralized application for every school you want to apply to. You fill out personal information, all of the classes you have taken in college and grades from those classes, different activities you have participated in during college (service, research, etc), write a personal statement essay, and select all of the medical schools you would like to send the application to (~30 bucks a pop). You also must find several professors and supervisors to write letters of recommendation, which are associated with your application file. The application service takes about 30 days to verify your application and transcript.

Schools that are interested (either in you or just your money) send a request for you to fill out their particular secondary applications, different for every school. Some are fairly simple, but most require another handful of essays to be written. After filling out the secondary, you get to pay another 75 - 100 dollars each.

After they screen the secondaries, schools then contact you to set up a time for an interview at the school. Of course, you get to pay to fly yourself to the school and find yourself food and lodging for your time there. If you make it this far, you basically qualify for acceptance at the school--they're checking to see if you're a good fit.

Now you wait. And wait, and wait. Schools make their decision and contact you via email, letter or telephone. Their deadline for decisions is in April. Some may decide and let you know sooner. In the meantime, you put all of your plans for the future on hold, because you don't know where you'll be living for the next four years.

Next post will be about my experience thus far in the process.

Our square footage

Out of curiosity, I measured today the square footage of the apartment we've been living in for the past (almost) two years: 337.5. Less than I thought. I'm proud of us.

Some political thoughts

For the past few months I've had a few thoughts rattling around in my head regarding our current political situation. Short version: I'm still finding my political stance, but there seems to be too much name-calling and too little actual political discussion to work towards solutions. Biased shouting is preventing reasonable dialogue. (See Limbaugh and Hannity vs. HuffPo and DailyKos. Note: I tend to ignore all four of these sources.)

Longer version: As far as I can tell, there is an entire spectrum of political beliefs. To simplify, we'll call one end of the spectrum the "extreme liberal" end, and the other we'll call the "extreme conservative" end. It seems to me that the people on the extremes of the spectrum are shouting very loudly at each other, and this prevents meaningful discussion. Name-calling doesn't help--I believe that most of the people leading our country at any given time are doing their best not to drive it into the ground. They want to help the nation and its people. Unfortunately, the people at each end of the spectrum have their own ideas about what is the right way to make that happen and then demonize others who happen to take a different viewpoint.

A very simple example: In general, liberals subscribe to the "tax and spend" ideology, where the public is taxed and government uses the money in different programs to meet needs of individuals/groups. Conservatives generally believe that the market should be left to operate on its own, and that individuals and communities should altruistically care for the needs of individuals/groups.

Both of these ideologies are valid ways of thinking and caring for the public. Each has their pros and cons. My point in this post is not to advocate either stance, but rather that neither side is made up completely of idiots. Smart, good people have found reasons to sway one way or the other. Maybe we should find out what those reasons are before we criticize what they choose to support. In the end, we may not be able to come to a perfect consensus. That's ok. At least we know what the others think and why. And then we can vote on it. The majority vote will win. Sometimes there's a stalemate and compromise is required. That's ok, too. That's the way this country was set up to run.

But let's not call each other names. That wasn't appropriate in Kindergarten, and it's not appropriate now.

We got a convertible!!

For more on this story, see Jess's blog here.