Thursday, August 30, 2007

Life's a football game, as every chump and champ knows

I've almost made it through my "pre-school week," which, judging by my daily naps and cookies, may be similar to a preschool week. The only thing missing is story time.

Today was a long day of orientation. It started out with a small continental breakfast, where I was introduced to even more SPH students, including two of the twenty-one males in the incoming epidemiology class. Turns out our breakdown is 79% female in epi this year, so the guys really do stick out, as they do across all of the PH disciplines.

The morning session was a really great talk about UMich and the future of public health, given by the dean, as well as a faculty panel about how the different public health professions intertwine to create a working research project. My favorite was the biostats professor who had a Powerpoint presentation including graphs with messy data on them, and discussed cleaning up the data. Her final slide was two lemonade glasses cheering each other (when life gives you lemons...).

Other things I learned today: incoming SPH students hail from 41 states and 10(?) countries, aside from Michigan. And about 75% of SPH students are female; though 79% of epid students are female and 64% of health public policy students are.

After the morning session, we had an epidemiology informational session, which was pretty straight forward, followed by lunch and a SPH activity/job/internship fair. Unfortunately, we didn't get to look around much at the fair because my HME (hospital & molecular epi) group met right away at 1, followed by my genetics IC group, to talk generally about what courses to take.

The difficult issue with my program is that a lot of professors seem to be on sabbatical this year, meaning that there are a few courses that we'd normally get to take this year that we have to squeeze in next year. Scheduling is kind of messy because of this. For one, we're now required to take a course this semester in my genetics IC for which we'd normally need prereqs.

There's one girl in epi that I really like a lot. She's younger, but she's very sweet and always around. She seems to know everyone, too. She's started getting people together every so often. I guess the weird thing about meeting new people is that it's hard to judge their comfort zones immediately upon meeting them. What I mean by this is that she's the type of girl who can walk up and give you a hug when she barely knows you. I'm pretty awkward about that until I know someone really well.

The big news of this coming weekend is the first Wolverines football game of the season. Kellie and I still need to figure out how we're going to get up to the stadium, but I'm sure it'll be fine. I'll have to find something blue and maize to wear, to cheer them on. It's against Appalachian State, which I'd guess is somewhere in North Carolina or something, but I've never heard of it. I'm guessing it's not a big rivalry like the upcoming OSU game in November, but I'm sure it'll still be a crazy time.

I'm home alone currently and enjoying it. The extreme socializing this week has been wreaking havoc on this introvert and tiring me out. I'm going to make myself some dinner and look at some stats and veg out for the night until Kellie gets home.

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