Commitments

Today I talked to my boss...and boss's wife...who is also my boss...about applying to the grad program in the department of comparative biomedical sciences. Boss says there's a double-degree DVM-Master's. And I got a new winter coat, partly because I've had the old one over 4 years (since freshman year college) and it was from the thrift shop summore, and partly because the guy sitting behind me on the bus yesterday morning puked all over it...

So it looks like I'm committing myself to stay in Madison at least another 5 years. Dammit. I want to go home. *wails*

To quote St. Paul: " I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."

Sometimes things fall into place so aptly that it's freaky and I wonder whether the sense of perfection surrounding a set of events is a) a gift from God or b) me being cocky and not noticing that the other shoe is about to drop. Dr. O is from South America (Dr. R, whose lab I'm in, is a norteamericana), so he has a first-person perspective on what international students face. The first time we met - to find out whether or not I'd get this job - I was fairly nervous, since I'd been unemployed for three weeks and almost broke, but he turned out to be very friendly. He asked me what I'd been doing over the summer and I explained about the bat project in the Philippines.
"You worked with bats? I love bats."
"Er...what kind of bats did you study?"
"Vampires."

Then later I showed him the bat comics (1 2 3).
"Can you translate them into Spanish?"
"Er...I don't know Spanish."
"That's okay. I'll help you."

This morning we were discussing grad school for me.
"So what do you want to do?"
"Well, the plague project is really interesting, but I'd like to study mosquito diseases too. You know, Malaysia has a lot of them. Like Nipah and dengue."
"Ah, dengue. It's a big problem in Colombia. Many people have died of the dengue hemorrhagic fever. Can you get me some papers about dengue?"
"Um, well, I don't know who's doing research on it in Malaysia. I can get you some newspaper articles."
"Just find out who's doing the research. Then, maybe you could do your fieldwork for your Master's in Malaysia. It's always better to do the research in the same country." [i.e. the same country where the disease under study is endemic.]
"Oh, that would be great."
"So, do you want to do fieldwork or lab research?"
"Um, um..."
He laughed. "You're like me. I don't know what i want to do."

He's also the type of person who winks at people. "This work with prairie dogs was done at the NWHC by Dr. TR. She's my collaborator. *wink* She's also my wife." [whew] When he said I had to be interviewed by his collaborators I was imagining running a gauntlet of grim-faced old grouches who would find me hopelessly underqualified...but she was just as nice. It feels hard to believe I've been at this job for two and a half months.

---

Given the number of international students at grad school in the natural and social sciences (most of us don't care about the humanities, they're wankers), I wonder if immigrants are going to start taking over the intellectual elite in America. And given how xenophobic Americans can be...if there's going to be a backlash against the PRs, new citizens, and first-gen kids driving the nation's research and technology, like the resentment that there's been against lower-class immigrants providing manual labour since the 19th century - despite the fact that Americans don't want the jobs that the migrant labourers hold. "My kid couldn't get into MIT's physics program because of those damn Chinks!" Wah wah wah.