grad school, finally

because i’ve spared you about fifty entries on the matter of grad school applications over the last 3 months, i feel that I’m entitled to one uber-long self-indulgent post telling the entire story from start to finish. over the past couple of weeks, especially, i’ve not felt like blogging much because every time i’ve sat down that’s pretty much all i could think of, and we all know how boring i get when i start on a subject and refuse to let it go. at least now you’re getting it all in one shot.

(though by the time you finish reading all of this, i hope you’ll have come to agree with me that the concatenation of events that got me here is pretty damn remarkable.)

so everyone remembers how I applied to nine schools to do a phd in clinical psychology in fall 2003 and how i was accepted by the university of minnesota. how I visited the place and then spent a month in agony trying to make a decision about whether or not to go. not all of you know that I was also accepted by the university of wisconsin the following year, an offer that I turned down for pretty much the same reasons that i did the first school. they were good programs – among the best – but I just couldn’t see myself living in minneapolis/madison for six, seven years. during some of the harder bits of the last couple of years, i sometimes regretted turning down those two offers (in much the same way that I occasionally regret not having tried for a government scholarship), but I’ve long since learned that regret is not to be trusted.

(i also felt a little bit guilty – i’m sure those two schools are dream programs for many people. please don’t murder me for trying to be happy.)

now for the extraordinary bit. over the next few years, a number of things happened to manoeuver me into a rather happy situation – the kicker being that none of these events seemed particularly felicitous at the time. you’ll recall that I started out looking for psychologist positions, and that I was turned down by the ppu and gsk. I dare say that had I got either of those jobs I would have worked for them for a good number of years, but in both cases something went wrong after the very last interview, at the stage where I was 99% sure i had been hired. jh’s aunt strongarmed me into applying to [that place], an organization I knew I was going to leave as soon as I found something else.

now recall the brief period that I spent in nie. because i was there, I was introduced to this man’s lab, and first entertained the idea of going back to work on fmri research (which I did not think even existed in singapore). when a place actually opened up in that lab in march last year, i applied, and would have got the job but for the fact that one of my referees (one of my profs from duke, bless her soul) didn’t manage to get a letter written for me on time. he gave the position to someone else.

what this accomplished, though, was to put me in a place where I was prepared to take on any psychology-related research job. (the horror of spending nearly 2 hours getting to work every morning was also taking its toll). things then started happening very fast. minz and her cousin helped me take a good hard look at imh, where i discovered a department that was hiring RAs. at almost the same time, i stumbled across the ad on the singapore psychological society’s website for my current position, and applied to that too. of the two, i was more inclined towards imh (you know, with there being actual sick people there and all).

i went through both interviews, and got both jobs. the call from the cnl came first. i told them i was interested, and signed the papers with the full intention of backing out if the imh deal happened (6 months in hr had taught me that people do bastard things like that all the time. all the time. no guilt, no qualms, and i'm not listening to anything anyone has to say. lalalalala) imh got back to me with an offer – of a really low salary. i told them that i was very interested in the position, but that something more befitting a graduate with 2:1 honours would be nice. I began negotiating for something better – and after a whole lot of backing and forthing and miscommunication and bureaucratic bullshit on their part, they managed to give the job to someone else, despite the fact that i had already verbally accepted it. screaming, ranting and a strongly-worded letter of complaint brought me no joy, and that’s how i ended up where i am now.

so everyone knows that i started on the sleep deprivation research. i actually did not like the lab in my first couple of weeks on the job (for reasons I shall not write about here), but i got used to the unpleasant things and made a few good friends and before you knew it i was actually rather glad that i had taken this job and not any other. for one thing, the work-related discussions we had were surprisingly intelligent; for another, the people around me weren’t idiots, and i wasn’t being treated like one myself (never take this for granted).

and it was through the lab that i got to know this man, one of our collaborators, and learned that he advises clinical psychology students, and also that the university of pennsylvania allows candidates to reactivate their applications with little fuss (well, US$70 and a new personal statement worth of fuss). and i was like: why the hell not? i told my boss what my intentions were, and he was extremely supportive, and packed me off to penn after the conference we went to in november, and put in a good word. and dinges, for whatever reason, really liked the idea of me working for him, and he helped to grease the wheels. all sorts of other strange and wonderful things happened too – connections turning up between my recommenders and people on the graduate committee, having been a medic counting as “previous clinical exposure”, the fact that the graduate group just so happened to need someone with experience in mri this year. and everything sort of slotted itself into place like a soma cube and before you knew it, i was in.

so there you have it, i’m headed off to philadelphia in the fall to trade the real world for thirty-page papers, 16-hour days in the lab, cheap facsimiles of home cooking, and endless whining about my stipend not being large enough. and all you guys back here doing ot and reservist and reverting to emails will write to me and tell me to shut up, and in reply i’ll pen million-word blog entries explaining my problems in excruciating detail. and cp has already told me that unless i send him regular and expensive presents leaving his umvelt will mean departing from his consciousness. and despite all of that, or perhaps partly because of it, it will be good. i can’t wait.