Biasiswa Agong follow-up

For whatever peculiar reason, my post last year on interviewing for the Biasiswa Agong (King's Scholarship) is the first English language Google hit for "biasiswa agong", even above the JPA's page. This is sort of weird because I didn't get it (only 10 scholarships for MS and 5 for PhD are offered per year).

Anyway, a couple of people subesquently posted comments asking for advice (sorry for the delays in replying). Here's a short list of what I think I did right and wrong, hope it helps.

• In the letter notifying interviewees, they say to bring a hard copy of your proposal. Bring FOUR copies - 1 for each interviewer and 1 for yourself so you don't get confused.
• Also bring a copy of your CV just in case - if I remember correctly, the original application that we mailed in required one, but won't hurt right?
• Also bring a short outline of a verbal presentation of your proposal so you can rehearse silently while you're waiting. It's an interview not a presentation though, so don't make yourself a long speech.
• If you've been studying abroad for a while, PRACTICE YOUR BM!!! The interview was in English, but they asked a few sentences in Malay to check if I was still reasonably fluent. Pull out your long-forgotten SPM buku rujukan or whatever.
• Even if 1 interviewer does most of the talking, try to look at/address all of them while you're speaking. My interviewers were 1 Malay lady and 2 men; the lady seemed to talk most and to know the most about the subject I was discussing.
• Make sure you can explain how your studies/research will be useful to the rakyat eventually.
• If you're applying for a program abroad, be prepared with a convincing reason you won't just take the money and run (I think the govt is becoming a bit more aware of the brain drain problem even if they still suck at corralling the undergrad JPA scholars). And no, "my parents are getting old" is not convincing.
• Try to make yourself sound original and independent. This is where I think I screwed up - my current advisor/boss had just emailed me a big PDF of his grant proposal so I was sort of like "Er, yah, I'm just going to be the research assistant on this cool project..." *slaps forehead*

Good luck to you people who contacted me or who are reading this...let me know how it goes!

By the way, they suck at notifying unsuccessful candidates. I only found out when there was a newspaper article about the YDP Agong having lunch or something with the scholars. I can understand not notifying every Ali, Muthu, and Ah Beng who applied, but there weren't that many people who made it to the interview stage so at least could have sent out "We regret to inform..." letters right?

As for me...I came to the US anyway. I'm 8 months into a 2-year MS program. My salary and tuition are being covered partly by a scholarship from the institution I'm at (you know, "institution" sounds a bit like a mental hospital...) and partly by my PI's grant funding, since I'm working for him as a research assistant. This is generally what happens in the US for students in the natural sciences - funded either as RAs or TAs (teaching assistants, who teach undergrad classes).

However, if you're in bio like me and thinking of taking the same path to "the States", be warned that the NIH (National Institutes of Health), which is one of the biggest resources for life sciences research here, has been funding a smaller and smaller fraction of grant applications over the past few years, so your boss may run out of money for graduate student salaries. One of my lab-mates just lost her job due our boss pokai. So keep looking for other scholarships, and also for TA-ships and the like.

By the way - if you have any adik-beradik who want to study in the US for undergrad, tell them to apply to Williams College. Williams gives all international students a roundtrip ticket home annually. I almost fainted when my sis FlowerMoonFish told me. Bloody kid!

Straight from the fishie's mouth

Conversation with my sister on the CTA train:

"You know, if somebody wanted to really terrorize Singapore, they should bomb the junior colleges during assembly time."
"Oh really?"
"Hit RJ, take out the leaders; hit Hwa Chong, take out the thinkers; hit AC, take out the philanthropists. I've been telling my friends about this for years."
"Well, given the amount of pressure in Singapore, it's gonna happen...some brilliant but psychotic kid is going to snap."
"Singapore should be glad I'm not psychotic."
"Wah, shiok sendiri eh?"
"Er...I didn't meant I was calling myself the other adjective."
"Yeah right."

Hanging out with sis

My little sister FlowerMoonFish arrived in the US yesterday...Steve and I went to pick her up at O'Hare. She'll be starting college at Williams in Massachusetts this fall, and I could strangle the bloody kid 'cos I'm jealous she's going to a school that has enough money to give its internationals a free roundtrip ticket home every year.

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At the moment we're just hanging out in my apartment with Lina. Just finished reading about the Backstroke of the West, which is a movie about why you shouldn't back-translate subtitles from one language into the original. (Some guy bought a pirated DVD of Revenge of the Sith, the kind that was videotaped by someone in the cinema. The English subs on the DVD had been back-translated from the original Chinese subs!)

(So thaaaaat's where the "DO NOT WANT!" thing came from.)

Also, FMF says of the second commenter, "I bet it's a Malaysian." Go us! _{(If any S'poreans are reading this pls don't kill me.)}

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We were out all afternoon and I'd let the cat out when we left so she was covered in burrs as usual. FMF was petting her and thought she'd found another one:

FMF: This burr's not coming out. Wait, it's not a burr!
me: Lemme see?
[small pink thing surrounded by 1cm patch of bare skin]
me: Darling, this cat is a girl. That is a nipple.
FMF: Oh, sorry cat!

=D

...under a gibbous moon

I got an email from Steve containing the phrase

Every Wednesday, someone sacrifices a mother rat..."

and to me it would have made perfect sense even out of context, even if I hadn't been asking after the rat, because I now think in terms of scheduling experiments, harvesting fresh cells.

...and then I realized that to someone else, we would sound like frigging Satanists =D

Also, I was going to reply to Steve's email and forward the relevant chunks to my advisor, but somehow I replied to the boyfriend and added el jefe's email by mistake. Which wouldn't have been terrible except that I signed off with "Thanks sweetie!"

So if you don't see any more updates to this blog, it's because I've ended my shame.

Terminally.

Curds and Whey

Yogurt is a great dairy product for people who are lactose-intolerant. I love cheese and creamy things but frankly, they make me pang-pui a lot. Commercially available yogurt isn't too expensive, but it's awfully sweet, and to get unflavoured/unsweetened you have to buy from some overpriced hippy store like Whole Foods. Making your own is very easy, all it involves is mixing some store-bought yogurt with milk and incubating warm (somewhat above body temperature) for a few hours.

However, this time it curdled...it's not spoiled as it still tastes like yogurt. Perhaps it's because I put in both Roundy's (store brand) and Dannon and they're fighting?

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey
There came a big spider
Which sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

I think I'll just skim the curds off the top when I want to eat it...we have clean cheesecloth in lab but I'm not trusting anything that's been in a molecular biology lab to be used with food.

Writing on the Wall

Facebook has a function called "The Wall" which appears on users' profile pages, interest group pages, and event pages. It functions similarly to a tag board in that you post short messages, although it's a little more sophisticated and allows you to delete your own messages and messages that others have left on your personal Wall. One of my "friends" (okay, kid about the same age as my little brother whom we used to play with about a decade ago and haven't seen since) had this:

Candle at both ends

My cat concurs with my boyfriend that I'm not eating enough. TWO dead voles? Thanks babe, but I'm having sausages. She seriously intends them for me because she always brings the darn things home and then goes to eat her cat chow.

I had a bowl of soup...then I went to the local botanical gardens with friends and had apple pie with whipped cream...then I came home and made a bowl of salad and ate that with a sausage and some mashed potatoes...now I'm OK.

I wish I didn't get hungry so easily. For most people in this society, their problem is controlling overweight. I'm not exactly in danger of malnutrition, but it seems like after breakfast, the next thing on my mind is when I can take lunch break, and after lunch, the next thing on my mind is when I can go home and how long it's going to take to cook. After dinner I'm okay for a while but around midnight I start combing my cupboards for munchies (vainly, because I don't buy snacks often)...you get the idea.

Ken, who's married to a Filipina, was asking

Do all skinny Asian girls have that? Can eat a whole cow, pint of ice cream, and not gain a pound?

I think what Caucasians don't realize is that between the shorter stature and being built for tropical climates, for Asian - East and Southeast, not those tall Indian girls - women "fat" is defined as something over 60 kg (about 132 lb).

Or possibly less...my father still rags on my "heavy thighs" on occasion. Not that I care...all I want to know is, how the heck do I get my weekly grocery bill below $40?

The annoying thing about grocery shopping is that I could easily fill my stomach if I lived off greasy frozen meals like certain people do. The healthy veggies, fruit, and fresh meat (not preserved or precooked) is what's killing my wallet. And eating out in the US sucks because goods are cheap whereas services are at a premium, so cooked food is also damn ex. They also give you portions that are way too big so you're forced to buy more than you want. Sigh...take me back to where it's cheap enough to eat out every day. Laksa, man, laksa.

Cheney for Minister of Magic?

Click for larger version.

Personals II

This is more funny stuff from the personals section in the local weekly paper. Actually what's really funny is the juxtaposition of these two, they were next to each other:

TAKE A CHANCE...WM, 27, seeks good hearted, open minded Asian F, 18-35, for all the fun Madtown has to offer.

Actually that's the first yellow fever ad I've seen, which is a bit odd given the virtual epidemic of Asian girl/white guy couples around town, including me and Steven. But in the next column was this one:

SENSITIVE SLOW HANDS SWM, 53, fit, active skinhead...

The funniest possible scenario would be if the yellow fever twenty-something turned out to be the skinhead's son, going over to the dark side. Dark side! Geddit? Geddit? *runs away*

Bleep you like an animal

This is super funny. Apparently you can make female mice think they're males and try to hump everything in sight by removing their vomeronasal organs (either by genetic knockout or surgically).

Poor black mouse, the girl-on-top position doesn't work so well when you have four legs.

So sexual behaviour in mice is hardwired, but you can flip the switch:

Dulac thinks it makes total sense: "Instead of building a male brain and then a female brain, you build a mouse brain, and then there's a sensory switch that makes sure that the animal behaves appropriately according to its gender."

Let's not jump to any conclusions about the mutability or lack thereof of human gender, though:

It isn't clear how these findings might translate to other species. Many researchers think that the human vomeronasal organ is defunct, and the human TRPC2 gene is functionless.

"Different species use different sensory strategies to understand the world," says Dulac. She notes that whereas rodents use pheromones as an important trigger for sexual behaviour, primates and humans are more visual creatures.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

This is me, firing an Uzi in automatic mode:

(The gun belongs to Steve's cousin Michael, who DOES have a permit for it. I wish Steve could have caught the look on his face as he comes up behind me, convinced that the skinny little girl holding his expensive gun is going to topple over backward. We watched this video about five times just to laugh at how funny I look.)

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It's been an exhausting week. I was taking the Emerging Techniques in Protein and Genetic Engineering course at the BTCI, which was great but ran from 8:30am to 7pm every day, plus emailing 2 scientists I've never met (emailing strangers makes me nervous as hell) and trying to rewrite my Master's research proposal.

Then today (Saturday) I learned how to shoot. Steve's dad and cousin, who are both gun nuts (Michael until recently owned a gun shop) said I did a good job. More photos later, featuring more of the Uzi, an AK-47, an M-17, a Ruger .22, and an old .22 pump-action. I'm a happy kitty. ^_^