Friday, October 10, 2003
It's Friday again, and this time it's Fall Break. Fall break...hmph. Nowhere else is a four day weekend as glorified as here at Cornell. But I'll take it.
Got my prelims back from the other week, and it was a pleasant surprise to find out that I'm doing pretty well. Between the nervous breakdown at the beginning of the semester and the general business lately, I lost track of how I was doing academically. Most semesters it seems like I don't do as well as I'd like on the first round of prelims and then spend the rest of the semester catching up. But I'm off to a good start this time.
The Churchill thing has also been on my mind a lot. I did get in touch with the professor at Cambridge and he said it's a possibility that I could work with him. He asked for my CV, which had me freaking out because not only do I not have one already prepared, but I have almost nothing to go on one (publications, conferences, etc). So I let that stress me out for a day or two and then finally went over to the career center to look at some guides. The people there told me that most professors are so steeped in academia that when they say CV they mean resume, and that it would be ridiculous to expect an undergrad to have a CV. I got a second opinion from the Office of Undergrad Biology, which agreed with the first. So I updated my resume to emphasize my research, then sent it to Cambridge guy. The application doesn't look impossibly hard, but I'm still a bit worried over who to ask for my 4th letter of recommendation.
Can't by any means count on getting the Churchill, so I have to do normal grad school stuff this weekend. That means a lot of web surfing and GRE studying. I really have a lot of studying to do for the bio subject test, since it's based on actual knowledge rather than just analytical skills.
But I'm also going to have fun this weekend, or at least try. This afternoon Ryan is taking me to some hard to remember/spell tourist town up the lake. It'll be nice to get out of Ithaca. Which we're also doing tomorrow- going up to Rochester for DA's Founder's Day and staying overnight at Helen's. Then on Sunday I'll be in Homer, a suburb of Cortland (haha). I guess Monday and Tuesday will be grad school days. Then it's the push to Thanksgiving break. Ugh...how depressing! I shouldn't look that far into advance.
Got my prelims back from the other week, and it was a pleasant surprise to find out that I'm doing pretty well. Between the nervous breakdown at the beginning of the semester and the general business lately, I lost track of how I was doing academically. Most semesters it seems like I don't do as well as I'd like on the first round of prelims and then spend the rest of the semester catching up. But I'm off to a good start this time.
The Churchill thing has also been on my mind a lot. I did get in touch with the professor at Cambridge and he said it's a possibility that I could work with him. He asked for my CV, which had me freaking out because not only do I not have one already prepared, but I have almost nothing to go on one (publications, conferences, etc). So I let that stress me out for a day or two and then finally went over to the career center to look at some guides. The people there told me that most professors are so steeped in academia that when they say CV they mean resume, and that it would be ridiculous to expect an undergrad to have a CV. I got a second opinion from the Office of Undergrad Biology, which agreed with the first. So I updated my resume to emphasize my research, then sent it to Cambridge guy. The application doesn't look impossibly hard, but I'm still a bit worried over who to ask for my 4th letter of recommendation.
Can't by any means count on getting the Churchill, so I have to do normal grad school stuff this weekend. That means a lot of web surfing and GRE studying. I really have a lot of studying to do for the bio subject test, since it's based on actual knowledge rather than just analytical skills.
But I'm also going to have fun this weekend, or at least try. This afternoon Ryan is taking me to some hard to remember/spell tourist town up the lake. It'll be nice to get out of Ithaca. Which we're also doing tomorrow- going up to Rochester for DA's Founder's Day and staying overnight at Helen's. Then on Sunday I'll be in Homer, a suburb of Cortland (haha). I guess Monday and Tuesday will be grad school days. Then it's the push to Thanksgiving break. Ugh...how depressing! I shouldn't look that far into advance.
