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Attempt number 2138791 to restart this place...

Despite the amount of grad students I run into, the average folk I encounter or interact with is really still a normal working person. Some, if you're my age, are about 3-4 years into their career. Others have been at it for a while. Some, certainly, are still students. I've gotten tons of "so...what it is that a PhD do?" over the last few weeks, and I'm always not totally sure how to answer that the best.

I think one difficult thing with cross-background small talk is that people often find it difficult to relate. On the surface, there is very little similarity between my "job" as a PhD student and my peers who are full time programmers or are in management rolls. But actually, there are tons of similarities... We use the same tools (coding IDEs, compile time, SVN, putty, SSH, code queues, code merge, design paradigm, data migrations, long hours looking for the missing ";"), need to deal with the same kind of constraints (big projects with little manpower or resources, lack of expertise for self and/or support staff, having to chose between doing something myself because I know it best or delegating it off but needing them to learn a bunch of things first before you can get the results you need, making decisions myself vs passing the decision to higher-ups, pressing deadlines to my coworkers). Even reading and writing peer-review stuff has a parallel, in people needing to read technical documents and project reviews. Just need to find a better angle to present your work/thoughts/struggles and sometimes it becomes that much more relatable.

Sometimes, when I'm chatting with some of these people about work, we inevitably hit topics where I pretty know nothing about (I can only pretend that PhD is like a manager for so long), but that's really not that bad. I would have learned something interesting from the conversation if we start talking about things I don't know. The spirit of academics is to expand one's knowledge, after all, and I'd like to think this extends a bit beyond what MATLAB can afford me. Certainly one big thing I've been learning from grad cell, and various different socials that brings me outside of my little campus office.

Nexus'ed

Last week (actually, probably for the last 3 weeks), the tech world was focused on the release of a particular phone, the Nexus 5. I generally am not too focused on releases like this, but somewhere between general unhappiness at cell phone contract, my phone's likelihood to spontaneously combust crash, and the fact that tech nerds like myself just likes big numbers. After refreshing the inventory page hourly for 30 hours (minus sleep time, of course), Google allowed me to place an order.

Of course, Google doesn't have these phones right now. They're shipping in 3 weeks. They just released the website to placate people. But it worked. Much comparison has been made to the Google server crashes back for the Nexus 4 launch. All people wanted was to have their place in line. Instant relief, when I clicked on that Checkout button. I'm sure there's some bio-chem at work here. Dopamine and all that good stuff.

I'm not a big spender, and as I was reflecting after making the purchase, and the urgency to which I wanted to do this, I had to remind myself that it's just a phone. A nice, state-of-the-art phone with a mediocre camera and average battery life (rated 8.8 on Mobilesyrup review!), to which I've read half a dozens of reviews to, but still just a phone nevertheless. I was surprised at how strong my own consumeristic sentiment was, especially since I constantly use the excuse "grad student budget" to extract myself from making big/spontaneous purchases and live within means. For those 30 hours, I was reminded where my heart is. I remember laughing and shaking my head with disbelief when I heard about people lining up for hours for a gold iPhone 5S, but here I am, refreshing away, not any better.

Don't get me wrong. I was brought up with the mentality of "if you need something, buy it". I think people should buy technology that they'll be happy with. They should pour over reviews and make informed decisions. They should wait a few weeks to make sure the first batch of the product is actually decent. They should reflect on their purchases. I did that for my last laptop purchase. But at the end of the day, it's just a gadget.

A few weeks back, Grad Cell did a bible study on Matthew 6, so we have excerpts of this passage sticky-noted all over my house, so I've been reading it every time I brush my teeth. I don't consider myself materialistic, and whereas I like reading about technology, I've never been the type to line up to buy the latest-and-greatest. But the verse certainly struck home for me, now, especially with a defense as flimsy as "grad student funding".

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

- Matthew 6:19-24

Accumulation

Grad students in general complain a lot about grad school (see: PhD comics), but I think one undeniable fact about it is the accumulation of knowledge. I worked for a prof during one of my co-op terms, and he's now applying for a Canadian Research Chair, which is pretty cool. One of the requirements for the CRC is that he had to give a seminar on his target application, so I decided to drop in on the seminar.

Not that much of the seminar was that new to me. I've seen them either in his course that I took, or when I was co-op'ing. Certainly, having a stronger algorithms, machine learning and robotics background, I can appreciate the ideas and models more, and ended up talking to him at the end, pointing out different algorithms that is probably worth trying. Felt super weird, telling a prof that I've got some ideas for him to try.

I think a big part of growing up is that we don't see that we're growing up. I still refer to my parents as the "adults" and us as the "kids". PhD has been tough because really, my prof is training us to be her peer (never going to happen), and the responsibilities and expectations are gradually shifting to me. But that's what real life is like as well. A reminder to raise to the responsibilities and expectations set before us.

As a side note, sometimes I get asked what PhD is like. I've come to describe it as this:

• Undergrad - Your prof asks you a question...then he answers it
• Masters - Your prof asks you a question...then you answer it
• PhD - You prof looks at you. You ask yourself a question. Then you answer it

That, and I point them to PhD comics. 

Start of an amazing race

Joanna is a fan of the show Amazing Race, and has on occasion noted that it’d be fun to be part of something like that. Though, the chances of that is pretty low, given that neither of us are fans of the camera. As such, I thought it would be nice if I set up something similar for her to go through. Nothing big, maybe a few things to find, some tasks to complete, some places to go to.

I decided to separate the Race into three components: Joanna's Toronto house, Toronto people, and Waterloo people. 

Toronto House Scavenger Hunt (Sat)
This was fairly easy to set up. I hid several items in her house, and had her search for it. Some of the more interesting items included:

• A can of Campbell soup under her computer desk - For some random minor anniversary (like 2 years and 5 months or something like that), we bought some food at the local grocery store and went over to her place, intending to cook. However, this is during that crazy November 2012 storm and power went out at her place. Luckily, we bought emergency food: a can of soup. Unluckily, the microwave and the oven didn't work because the power was out. Thus, the dinner was unmicrowaved canned soup. The only reason why I knew that wouldn't give us food poisoning is because the UWO guys did it all the time. If any of those guys happen to be reading this, I formally apologize for that one time where I renounced your practice of not using the microwave when it was just around the corner at Taylor.
• A University of Waterloo teddy bear with a shirt that says "Someone at Waterloo loves me" - A while ago, she got me a similar bear from McMaster. It seemed almost like regifting if I just got her the same thing back, so I hid it behind some other stuff animals that she has. Except for she found it randomly, way ahead of schedule. That took some quick improvising on my part.
• Fundamental Nursing - I hid a note in one of her nursing textbooks. The clue pointing to it was encoded by a shifted alphabet cypher that she figured out...of course, I proceeded to misspell the name of the textbook in the cypher. Good thing it was close enough. 

Now that I've made her run around a bit, I had planted the last clue so that she ends up calling one of her friends...

Toronto People Meeting ups (Sun to Fri)
 I met up with several of her friends, of either people she grew up with, or people she's became close with over the span of university. I was only able to include a handful (I did want to propose relatively soon, ya know) of people, but it largely involved me letting them know that Joanna will call them in some general time period, and that they should arrange to meet up in another time period, and when they do, she is to be handed some clues that leads to yet another people. 

A fair bit of running around for her. But it sounded like it was relatively interesting. This lasted two weeks, where she met up with 4 groups of people.

Waterloo Events (Sat)
I scheduled her events around two weekends that she would be back at town. She worked at Mikey's when she was younger, so we got her to clean, so that was kind of amusing. The big event here though, is a photo scavenger hunt, where she had to sift through Facebook photos. That took quite a while. 

Her family is also big into dumpling folding and board games, so I asked her sister to host such an event...then crashed it. It was her sister's birthday earlier in the week, so we thought it would be funny to show up with a cake in the middle of their party. Our insiders worked out well. 

Proposal (Sun)
After church and lunch, we started the last segment. For her to get her next clue, I told her that she had to beat me at a video game. She chose Puzzle Fighter, and proceeded to wipe the floor with me. And here I thought we'd be playing it for a while...

Her clues led her to E5, where a bottle of Green Tea Frappuccino (melted and shoved into a bottle) was waiting in a fridge in the student lounge. I had bought this on Sat, and got it into an old Sprite glass bottle I had. Unfortunately, I used her Starbucks card so she gets points, and I didn't realize that she gets alerted when she earned a new drink on my purchase. Another moment of quick thinking was needed when she asked me the next day (I rarely get Starbucks). 

While in Japan, we had joked that the Arashiyama bamboo forests would've been a perfect place to propose. If I had done it with a green tea latte (it was pretty good) in one hand and the ring in the other, and had Kobe steak afterwards, it would've been amazing engagement. 

Waterloo Park, unfortunately, was the closest forest I had available to me. Before we started dating, we had chatted at length about the idea. These chatting happened 1) in a house I no longer lived in, 2) in a parking lot, and 3) in a playground at Waterloo Park. Obviously, the most romantic location out of these is the parking lot the playground, so the clues let her to the playground. It was pretty busy there, so we eventually moved on to a soccer field. 

We chatted for a bit, and I felt that it was appropriate to remind ourselves Eph 5, so we did a bit of reading. And talked about tangential things. And tangented. It was rather nerve-wracking. When it really came down to it, I was on my knee for a good 5-10 minutes, asking her if she was ready for it. Inside the ring box was actually my Iron Ring (which we also joked about), which we laughed at for a bit before I pulled out the actual ring from my wallet. 

We went to dinner afterwards, with some of the Waterloo people that helped me pull this off, at Golf's. Not quite Kobe, but steak nevertheless. 

Oh, right. She said yes.

Road to higher education

The decision to continue onto PhD has not been a trivial nor straightforward one. Nor should it be. I didn't see myself facing this decision, but I suppose most people don't know where they'll end up when they first stepped onto their university campus.

There are many reasons on why I should do it. Wanting to stay in biomedical R&D. I'm actually starting to get the topics I'm involved in now. The research topic is good and worthwhile and applicable. It'll be needed to climb the corporate ladder. Continue my current research and not assume that the grass is greener on the other side. A opened door that really isn't that common. It'll likely be difficult to come back to school once I start working, due to financial and social obligations. Poor job market. But there also many reasons why I shouldn't do it. It feels like I'm copping out of job applications. One shouldn't default into a PhD. Higher education can limit certain career options. Most people can find a job with 4 years of university, so the benefit of the extra 6 years is questionable. I wouldn't want to be typecasted into a "head in the cloud" academic, who can't do anything practical because all I know is research and theory. Rather not become prideful and egotistical in the letters behind my name. I've been in Waterloo (and of school in general, for that matter) for a rather long time already, and it'd likely be good to make a full break with the place. Most of my friends have graduated and moved on.

And the argument continues. Consulting n number of people results in n number of different opinions. Thinking about the future leads to dozens more what-if situations. The more one tries to grasp onto the future, the more the uncertainty of the future grasps you.

At the end of the day, the tipping factor was an unexpected one: my faith. In the midst of all the career calculations and thinking about future plans, I reflected on how stepping into biomedical engineering, to begin with, was a faith-driven decision. That my Masters degree was a faith-driven decision. And so the next step should also be a faith-driven decision. Beyond my original decisions that brought me into biomedical, and a desire to innovate and advance our medical field, I have realized that perhaps this is another calling as well.

We often talk about how our faith should spill over into other aspects of our lives. As the fundamentalists retreated from the "toxic effect" of modern society, a key few chose to become high profile apologists in order to maintain the Christian voice, but the retreat led to further animosity between the camps. Today, everything is politicized. One can hardly even eat fried chicken without facing some accusations. Christians and non-Christian argue about everything. It is fashionable to take potshots at the Christian mentality and belief, as it is easy to point at Christians and accuse them of bigotry, which itself is an intolerant thought. There will always be a camp within all fraction that take the headlines. Extremest Christians. Radical Muslim. Antagonistic Atheists. And so forth. The Internet has done much to add to the fire. Hardly any group can claim perfection, and the Christians ought to be the first to stand down. But this is another discussion for another time.

Christians have somehow garnered a reputation for being anti-science, a reputation that people like Francis Collins [1] and Tim Keller [2] are pushing back against in matters such as evolution. Although some articles (citation needed - can't remember where I read that from anymore) report that the number of scientist subscribing to the Christian faith are indeed rising, the number of Christians in higher educations still continue to be lacking. I feel that it is important that Christianity remains a viable option for "intellectuals", whatever that may entail in the eyes of detractors, and not for the "backward". That this action in itself is an act of apologetics. That added a good weight to the should pile, and so here I go.

Interesting readings (hardly the only point of views, but articles for more science-y people):
[1] Collins, F. S. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. 2006. Free Press
[2] Keller, T. Creation, Evolution and Christan Laypeople. 2012. The BioLogos Foundation. Link.