Graduation Part I

So... Sorry about the lack of posting for an entire month.  If you're reading this, you are one loyal blog reader!  I mentioned graduation, which was great.  My parents came to visit:

I got to wear the Master's robe, which has strange, long, bat sleeves:

I briefly coveted the hoods that the PhDs got to wear, but a PhD is officially off the list for the next couple of years.  That's one decision down.  It may come up again later, but I'm going to get back into the clinical side that I enjoy and then decide, after a couple of years of experience, how I can get a PhD my way-- without having to give up working with people.
 
I got my degree, which is completely in Latin:

And, of course, I got lots of congratulations and support from a lot of other people too!  Thank you so much, not just for being there at the end, but for helping me through the last two years!

Despite all of this, the fact the I am finished didn't really sink in fully until I saw the extra letters after my name on a poster we presented for work. And I got to change my signature line, which now reads, "Rachel Voss, MPH."  Kinda cool.  Kinda cool like these pictures, which are some of my favorites from the weekend:

Can you see the words?  These are etched in the stone under the Brown bear on the main green, and I could not have said it better myself. It took a lot of work, and it feels really good to be finished!

Next post: Graduation part II and Becca's wedding!  And the status of the June list.  Stay tuned-- I promise it will not take me another month. :)

Almost there

So... I'm graduating tomorrow.

Finally.

Again.

Hallelujah!

Yup, that about sums it up.  :) Pictures to come soon, after I've finished hiking around Providence with the parents.

Lucky?

I bought my first lottery ticket this weekend.  Oops... Ha ha!  Who buys a lottery ticket on accident?!

I was rushing through the grocery store, and my cashier was a very bubbly, chatty woman.  That would have been lovely, except that my brain was not firing on all cylinders; it was was Friday, my 5th day in a row of getting only 5 hours of sleep the night before.  That is not enough to keep this Rachel functioning very well!  So when she asked me if I wanted a Jimmy Fund ticket, I asked her what it was and I heard "It's for the children.................... baseball.............. helping.............. Isn't that nice?!"  Of course that's nice.  I've seen little promotions at grocery stores before where you buy a little paper heart for a dollar and the proceeds go to the nearest children's hospital, so that's the picture I connected with my hazy processing of her answer.

What she actually meant vaguely dawned on me when she handed me the ticket with my receipt.  And when I came across it in my wallet today, sure enough, it's a Triple Winner ticket!  Lol.

And that, my friends, is why children ask their parents for things when they're tired.  Because they say yes when what they really mean is, "I can't think right now.  Come back in the morning."  Which should probably be my standard reply for anything you ask me after 7:00pm.  :)

But it's all for a good cause-- my thesis is getting better and better with every early-morning blaze of work, and I am so excited to be almost finished!  I've been playing occasionally too, so I feel pretty content with my current haze, at least for a couple more weeks!

Circle of Life

Well, it's been about a "week" (=month) since I last posted... oops.

So last month I went to see Maddie and Dan in NY, which was fantastic. As Maddie said, it's nice to spend time with old friends who know all of your idiosyncrasies-- and love you anyway! For example, who else but a dear, dear friend would take me to a whole cafe full of peanut butter?

Along with our normal PB&J, we had a PB and nutella sandwich, which conjured up all kinds of great memories from Spain, when Maddie first had her reeeal taste of 24-7 Rachel "energy." :) We spent some great girl time, and had fun with Dan, going out for sushi and loving the Olympics. Much love, you guys!

The next weekend, Cassidy and I went to the Lion King in Boston.

It was phenomenal. I love, love, love music. The costumes were amazing and, as usual, I just could not get over the dancing. I was just awed by the way the costumes and dancers fused together to portray the animals, and there were some points where I almost forgot there were people behind those animals. My kids better watch out, because I'm going to do my best to get them to dance.

The last couple of weekends have mostly just been baby showers (really, a rash of them!). And, I've been doing my own dance called "Thinking in Circles." This is a complex dance that involves me dancing from thesis to job to life decisions to thesis.... The circle of life. :)

The thesis is finally coming along. I actually finished my final statistical analysis this week! I'm about 80% finished with the rest of the writing and am excited to bang out the rest of it tomorrow to submit for revisions. This week is spring break, so I'll have the whole week to tie up loose ends. The end is so close I can taste it.

However, I haven't made much progress in the decisions about life-direction. In fact, the decision got much more complicated on Friday when my thesis reader suggested I might consider a PhD... and I got an uncomfortable feeling similar to when I decided to switch to Public Health. That feeling like, "Hm, that could be an option. Wait, that was NOT on my list of options. Excuse me?"

It's a new, half-formed idea that's only been rolling around in my head for a couple of days. But it's a thought, and if I go for it, it changes everything. Everything about looking for a job. Everything about which city I'm going to live in. Everything about the timeline of exactly when I leave Providence.

So, to anyone who feels inclined to comment, I'd love to know:

1- How do you (or someone you know) balance a family and a PhD? (Because I hope/kind of assume I will get married in the next five years.)

2- What did you do during your PhD to feel like you were "giving back"? I really just want to help people, and I'd really like to avoid a crisis at age 30 where I look at my life and feel like I haven't done anything to help anyone, but rather have spent 10 years just collecting degrees.

I'm open to other advice too, like how to begin finding a professor to work with and getting the university to pay you to be there.

Crazy times ahead. Thanks to everyone who understands when I can't commit to anything more than two months from now. Who understands when I don't want to commit to anything a week from now because I'm tired of making decisions. And who understands when it takes me a week to respond to emails. I'm working on it, and I will gladly share the news when I know what I'm doing!

Present

I don't really have time for pictures or anything terribly insightful, but just so you know I'm still here...

I'm here!

It's crunch time on my thesis and I fell way behind this weekend because it was nice on Saturday so I wanted to play outside, and because I wasn't very assertive about sticking to the schedule I knew I needed to stick to. It's fine though, and I'll just work harder this week. I am grateful to be distracted by sunshine and its promise of spring!

Next time I actually write, I'll post pictures from NY with Maddie and Dan, whom I love, and some pictures from seeing the Lion King with Cassidy. Other than that, I'm still just working on the thesis and trying to find a job/plan my future. Come back in... a week. :)

Rock and roll.

Good Work

Once upon a time, there was a girl who felt like she spent all day every day thinking about work or school, except on weekends when she pretended neither existed and just played.

Sometimes she wondered if these weekend shindigs were a good idea since they usually resulted in lots of planning work prior and catch-up work after, but she continued going because all work and no play is DULL (as the saying goes).

Recent adventuring has included:

- Exploring a state park and getting wildly lost (but finding our way out again).

- Discovering a fantastic little town in Rhode Island called North Kingstown, which tastes a little bit like Newport (the touristy beach town to the south) but is not nearly as packed.

- Spending a weekend in Massachusetts for a regional activity, meeting lots of people, and finally finding someone who will let me speak Spanish when we're hanging out. :) I'm kind of rusty.

This weekend is a Pride-and-Prejudice style cotillion, and next weekend is Valentine's Day, which will include single-serving, heart-shaped pizzas as a tribute to one of my favorite childhood traditions.

So I'm not really just working. :) And the classes I'm taking are much more exciting this semester. I'm working on a health promotion campaign at the department of health for one of my "classes" and taking a credit for working on my thesis. The one real class I'm taking is all about measuring eating behaviors, which has reminded me that I do like school-- I love love love humans and all of the science that goes into helping them live happily and healthily. (Not sure that's really a word, but you know what I mean.)

I'd say that's a pretty good balance. Time to get back to rocking and rolling on the thesis... I am so excited to be close to the end!

TypeTypeType

My wrists are angry from a recent storm of typing at work. So what am I doing now?

Typing.

Right, because the theory is that if I tie myself to the computer I will finish my thesis faster.

But my brain is angry from the recent storm of thinking at work and is staging a mutiny. (After all, I just finished a pretty good whitepaper on something I didn't know anything about prior to Monday. So don't I deserve not to have to write?)

I have a feeling blogging is going to be kind of sporadic for the next couple of months. I promise I will do my best!

Intense

Remember all the writing I said I had to do (and didn't really do because I was busy flitting around between states instead)? Well, the time of reckoning has arrived.

So I'll write a real post later this week. If you want to know how I'm doing in the meantime, picture me bouncing furiously on my exercise ball while I type an unending stream of intelligent thoughts. Ha ha! I was actually really productive yesterday, and while I'm feeling a little sluggish tonight, I think moving my little Christmas tree (thanks, Ginna) into my room for mood lighting is helping. :)

Rock and roll.

Health Care and Halloween

I'm just feeling remarkably jaded today, and days like today make me think about moving to a commune or another country. In my classes today, I struggled with a couple of things:

- The RI health insurance commissioner told me that the "universal care" in Massachusetts (MassHealth) is not going broke. His reasoning was that they are exactly on budget-- they just didn't count on the state's revenue dropping 20%.

This is like saying that if I budgeted $100 and spent exactly $100, but only have $80, I'm fine. WHAT?!

The problem with health care reform is that we're not doing anything to reform health care-- we're just reforming who pays for it. I think we should call it "health care financing reform" instead so we can adjust our expectations accordingly. Then the discussion can keep ignoring preventive care or systems change without making people like me crazy.

- Some PhD who came to speak about food safety in my environmental health class basically cautioned against organics because the fertilizer people use may have E. Coli in it. Okay, so here's a thought-- how about we fix the system of giant feed lots that packs a bunch of animals too closely together and feeds them things that they can't digest properly (corn), which is what propagates the bacteria. And then, why don't we fix the system where we have giant industrial butchering complexes where people have to do their jobs so fast (in order to keep up with the assembly line) that they accidentally "spill" dangerous bacteria out of intestines into the meat. Organics aren't as good for the environment and health as local food, but they're still a pretty good thing. I wouldn't stop buying organics because of E. Coli.

I think this is why I hate am very frustrated with my program.

I'm feeling like, if I can't actually fix the root of the problem, then I don't want to pretend that I can. I should just take what I've learned and go back to direct patient care where I can help people develop reasonable work-arounds to deal with the problems as they are manifest in their lives. That way, at least one person benefits, even though the system is improving at the speed of cold molasses dripping.

On the upside, I do still believe that some communities can change, and even though we're still chopping at the branches instead of the root, sometimes we manage to cut a little more closely to the roots. Like the fact that some farmer's markets are now accepting WIC and food stamps at farmer's markets-- that's a lower branch.

Okay, enough of my venting. Sometimes I do stop stressing about changing the world and have some fun.

A neighboring stake hosted a Halloween dance last week and my friends, Mark and Jordan, dressed up with me. I love these guys, because they're always up for doing things-- I don't have to try to drag them along. :)



Good friends, good times.

Oops

Oops, it's October. And I haven't posted for awhile. A brief overview:

1- School is fine. I have a lot of papers to write, including my thesis. (Which is finally pinned down-- how having enough food on a regular basis affects people's ability to change dietary behaviors.)

2- If you feel like doing a good deed, I am looking for images (like advertisements, etc.) that show "health," especially images or slogans that might have questionable validity. I'm doing a paper on how mass media affects how we think about health, so send me a link if you find something! :)

3- It's starting to cool down around here. This means snuggling with a big quilt at night (love!) and sweaters (love love!) and jeans (love love LOVE!). And of course, it means apples and butternut squash and trees that look like they're flaming. Excellent.

4- I found a new favorite recipe (pesto alla trapanese) and I made it with basil that I grew myself! (It's pretty much the only thing that survived this summer, thanks to the brutal rainstorm at the beginning that trounced all of my tender shoots). I also discovered that roasting nuts in a skillet is really easy and makes nuts taste so good. :) I might even like this better than the usual basil/pine nut pesto. Yum.

Number Fun

Well hello. I'm feeling much better (mostly just tired). Some updates:

8 is (roughly) the number of months I have until I graduate! Classes started (as you've probably guessed), and I'm trying to make all the papers and reading and thesis happen like magic. I like to tell everyone I meet that I'm finishing my master's even though I have 8+ months left. I think it puts a positive spin on things. :)

40 is the number of people who came to our last YSA church activity, thanks to wonderful support from the other leaders I'm working with as stake YSA rep (i.e., single Mormons-finder/activities planner). And 6 is the number of LDS freshman at Brown! By the time I leave, I'm hoping the network is a little more stable so people can come in and out of it easily without having to start from scratch every time someone moves. We are on our way!

5 is the number of people I had camping on various air mattresses all over my apartment this weekend. My friend Ben was road-tripping from D.C. with some friends, so they visited Providence Saturday night for Waterfire. I haven't been since last summer when I took Maddie, and I have to say they stepped it up a little. We also only walked around for an hour or two-- which is about all the entertainment bonfires in the middle of a river can offer. :)

6 or 7 is the number of songs we banged through in my first choir practice with a choir up in Boston. That's a lot of songs in only 2 hours, and though I am a pretty decent sight reader, I felt like everyone else already knew what they were doing! Turns out that's true-- Jason (the friend that recruited me to join!) explained to me later that the choir has already done most of those songs--so many people have been working on them for, oh, 8-10 years. Phew. It will definitely push my range though, which is good.

4 is the number of days until I can dish about the new calling (church job) I am getting. 300 is the number of different emotions that went through my heart when the bishop's counselor talked to me about it on Sunday, but that's what divine intervention is for. :)