I’m afraid that if we publicize ourselves as seeking to select the “best” students for admission, we will get… more box-tickers. Fewer lifelong learners. More obedient queuers. Fewer spontaneous beekeepers. More people aiming to graduate and be named “exceptional” for doing so. Fewer people aiming to shape the school that will (sometimes just barely) graduate them, and who actually do all the revolutionary rule-breaking that “exceptional” implies. (emphasis mine)

To this I say amen.

This weekend will be devoted to getting my life in order for the storm of travel that is to come between next week and the beginning of April. Once I get on my first plane, I believe there will be a grand total of 5 days where I’m not traveling. Amazingly enough, I managed to arrange my schedule so I’ll miss a grand total of one class – which is having an exam that day that I’ll simply take early.

Time management for this semester has not been perfect (it never will be), but it’s been amazingly good. The secret? Waking up early. Very, very, very early. And sleeping early – and adequately – and eating well, which sometimes for me means not guilting out over spending $3.50 on a large soup for lunch when I forget to pack the homemade meal I made the night before. Doing work at the office and being focused about it, and trying not to bring work home.

And that is how I juggle 4 graduate classes plus an independent study plus research on three days a week – I do that Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, and freelance and do my own reading (and some of my own research) Thursday-Friday. I have breaks, I take walks, I hang out with classmates, I spend entire days doing things other than work; I sleep, I eat, I go to random movie showings and talks and other campus events, I audit German 201 when I can and work my way through my grammar book when I can’t, and I spend time doing things like “let’s explore the hearing thing!” (read: go see audiologist, drive back and forth across town figuring out how Vocational Rehabilitation state services work, etc.)

It helps a lot that grad school classes for me have been heavily reading-based so far, and I’m a fast reader; one professor dumps about 300 pages of dense developmental psychology on us every week, and I usually read it after dinner on the evening it’s assigned. In fact, I try to do all my work for a class on the day of that class – a week before it’s due, that is, not the morning-of. And I do all of my meeting/workgroup followup immediately after the meeting (if I can) or that same day (if I can’t). This means I have some very, very long Mondays – 3 of my 4 classes meet on Mondays – but I know that when I’m done, I’m really done. It’s amazing how wonderful it feels to know it’s not possible for you to be forgetting something.

Again, it’s not perfect. I slip. I slip a lot. But it feels like I’m using my time more effectively this semester than I have in… any other semester I have ever been at school, so something’s working. And I’m letting myself do that – I’m trying hard things, it’s ok if I fail, I recalibrate and get back on track and readjust the track instead of beating myself up… which takes a lot of willpower, because it’s the intellectual-rational part of my brain that needs to keep on shouting “IT’S OKAY DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP” when I… beat myself up. (Instinct! It’s hard to fight that habit!) But progress is being made!

It helps to have something you really want to do. And it helps to make yourself focus on several things you want to do, and to turn down stuff, or keep extra stuff optional, so you don’t end up with towering piles of obligation. I suppose I would summarize my strategy this term as “when you take on an obligation, do it immediately, thus acquiring no obligation backlog whatsoever.”

I’d like to get better at regular exercise, which is something I’m still experimenting with – none of my lifehack attempts so far have gotten me to exercise regularly this semester, so I’ve decided that I’ll take advantage of Purdue’s cheap ($45 for the semester!) group fitness classes. Sure, maybe I should be able to do pushups on the floor of my own apartment. But I’m still new enough to the whole “fitness” thing that having structure, company, and people to nag me about my form is not a bad idea – and then maybe I’ll do pushups at home to practice outside of class. Who knows?

Had one of those “wait, how did 4 hours pass, and is it really 3am now?” conversations with Mark last night; there’s something satisfying in the sort of friendship where you can go months without contact and still know you’ll be slugging it out, no-holds-barred, over your new ideas and directions within a few minutes of starting to talk again. I give him shit, he gives me shit, and we thereby keep each other honest.

Sebastian sent me “WAT,” a brilliant 5-minute lightning talk on programming languages that left me howling with laughter. Via Karl Wurst came an insightful blog post on defaulting to closed and  Macneil Shonle’s “Why I Will Randomly Assign Students in Group Projects.” Fellow Olin alum Katie Rivard pointed me to Up The Ivy, an old satire of academic culture.

And now it’s time for coffeehouse decompression with Velvet and Nikitha. Mmm… quiet time.

1. IRB. “Wait. Not only do you not do IRB, you don’t even know what it is?” (Not Shannon – she trained as a sociologist. I meant the art/design students.)
2. How we describe ourselves. We had to write artist/designer statements for ourselves and for somebody else. An artist/designer statement by an artist or designer reads sort of like… philosophy. An engineer’s “artist/designer statement” reads like a resume parsed as a technical specification. (There’s another engineering education student in the class.)
3. What we need to justify. I showed Shannon the abstract I was working on and braced for questions on my (fuzzy and emergent) methodology – but she took one look and nodded – “ah yes, grounded theory!” – and said it looked good. “Wait. You… didn’t ask me to justify this? It looks okay? But it-” …is much more normal to be things-other-than-positivist in social science research. Yes. Forgot about that.
4. Thesis work. Art and engineering students tend to produce their Masters’ theses in two parts: a Thing and a Paper. In Engineering,the Paper is about the Thing. It describes the Thing, how made the Thing, how the thing Works. The Paper About The Thing is the Thesis. In contrast, art students are specifically not supposed to write their Paper about their Thing. They are not to explain their Thing. Instead, the Paper is a separate work that complements the Thing – I am not sure what that means yet – and the two together form the Thesis. I… am still trying to figure this one out. And don’t even ask me what a PhD in art looks like!

There are, I realize, huge differences between art and design – I’m not yet attuned to what those differences are (Shannon explained a few to me – department cultures, the objective/subjective balance in their work, individual vs collective shows, and so forth). So that’s something for more exploration later.

“The point of an institutional repository’s collection policy is so that you can say no.”

It’s not about what you will collect, it’s about what you won’t collect – how you don’t want to use your limited resources. Lunch with Mike was a joy; his casual comments (because he’s deeply embedded in his field) expanded to a wealth of information when I tracked them down. For instance, the Panton Principles (rationale for open data) – how did I not see this before?

I learned a lot about how someone thinks about an institutional repository. (I know it’s one view out of many possible ones, but still – getting a rich slice of that one view was extremely useful.) Content in Purdue’s IR is organized the same way its departments are organized; interdisciplinary research usually comes out of Discovery Park and goes in its corner of the repository. There are common actions that an IR’s workflow should handle well: consuming (downloading someone else’s papers), submitting (sending in your own), accepting (what it sounds like), and batching (creating collections of papers). Make sure you check and know all four.

Mike confirmed some other things I had been thinking about, like how catering to faculty self-interest (“ah, I can track publication downloads and use this for my tenure case!”) actually works well. Mandating something that should ostensibly be in faculty’s self-interest (“only publications listed in the IR count for your tenure evaluation!”) is… hard, and I’m not sure if I agree with that goal (I still live in a dream world where people do good things without being required to do them, apparently) but it’s got an undeniable impact on compliance rates.

On the way back, he introduced me to the work of Jason Priem, who looks at altmetrics – can we more accurately measure scholarly impact if we look at social media instead of merely journal citations? – and whose open access koans made me grin. Apparently Jason is speaking at Purdue in 2 weeks – I’m totally going. And apparently Jason is getting his PhD at the same place as Bryan Behrenshausen, last summer’s opensource.com intern (and the man behind the POSSE profiles from last summer – we’re currently having a debate about the future of POSSE, by the way).

My brain is swimming — and I haven’t even started my German translation homework yet. It’s been a good, good day. Extremely good. A day full of The Learn.

1. Gluten.
2. Lactose. (Yogurt/kefir/cheese seem to be fine as long as I don’t go nuts.)
3. Meat. (Red meat more than white meat, white meat more than seafood.)

I’m not allergic to any of these, but I do appear to be sensitive – it’s almost as if those three substances each has a slowly-draining reservoir (for engineers: look, it’s an integrator! For Oliners: look, it’s a bathtub!) somewhere inside me, and if I “fill” the reservoir by eating that substance faster than it can drain, my brain starts doing funky things. Actually, it’s not “as if” there were a reservoir – there is. It’s called my bloodstream.

The usual procedure for an experiment goes something like this:

1. Reset environment to known control state.
2. Introduce the intervention.
3. Record results.

The human body’s a funky thing, though. It depends on your mood, how much sleep you’re getting, how dehydrated (or not) you are, whether you had a big paper due that week, if you exercised, whether it’s cold outside… and there’s no reboot button. So finally we ended up with this little guide to food challenges – that’s what they’re called, “food challenges.” Sounds like a reality TV show! Anyway:

Reset environment to known control state. Have a “safe food diet” – a bunch of dishes that I like to eat, are nutritionally balanced (protein, carbs, fat, vegetables, fiber, all the stuff your mom told you when you were small), and don’t contain any of the stuff I’m trying to test for. So for me, a bowl of rice and black bean chili works – or curry over quinoa, or… you get the idea. Eat this for long enough that your system “clears out” whatever substances you’re testing; in allergy/immunization studies, this is usually 1-2 weeks. (Allergy and immunology journals, by the way, are nice sources of procedures for experimental setup; check out PubMed if you have access.) I’m going for 2 weeks, which lets me set approximately one food experiment up per month.

Introduce the intervention. In other words, “eat gluten, lactose, and/or meat,” while making sure my meals remain nutritionally balanced (so that any effects won’t be the results of, say, not eating fiber). In controlled doses, depending on what I want to test. Also, watch out for the placebo effect. Nutrition and food science journals are most useful as models for this segment of the study.

For instance, I think I have some gluten sensitivity; if I eat bread at every meal, my brain goes fuzzy. But if I’m on a gluten-free (or, since gluten is everywhere and I’m not vigilant enough about it, almost gluten-free) diet and have a slice of bread, I’m fine. So what’s the tipping point – how do I get a better model of that reservoir? How big is it (3 bread-slices?) and how fast does it drain (1 bread-slice per day, meaning that I could eat 2 slices of bread today and 1 tomorrow and be fine, but not 3 today?)

Record results. Since I’m looking at my brain state here – neurochemical changes, in other words -I want to look at how other researchers have measured “effects on thinking.” I tend to notice effects commonly associated with ADHD (yep, I have that too) – lack of focus, physical restlessness – so things like the Conner Scale or Hyperscheme (another scale) might be worth looking into; PubMed has plenty more that I don’t know about just yet. Again, watch for the placebo effect. Whenever possible, I’ll try to measure things somewhat less subjective than my opinion… but sometimes you just have to use your thoughts as an imperfect, messy instrument because that’s all you’ve got.

Neurochemical changes can happen fast. Stomach-brain communication is pretty quick – the “I’m full, stop being hungry!” signal takes maybe 20-30 minutes. So it’s possible I may be able to record these things during the meal – or at the very least, at the end of the day. Some food effects can take as long as 3 days to show up… but for mental-performance tracking, I’m likely looking at a shorter scale.

So that’s my lifehacking braindump for the day. Hopefully it’ll be useful to others experimenting with similar stuff (I’m looking at you, Matt Ritter). And many thanks to Dr. Annie Mahon for helping me geek out with her this morning!

Also, I need a lot more calcium than I’m getting. As a fairly skinny Asian woman who’s not big on lactose (milk), I’m at risk for osteoporosis; I eat yogurt on some days, but at best that gets me about 500mg of the stuff, and I need 1000. But you can only absorb 500mg at a time, and shouldn’t go over 2500mg in a day. No problem; I’ll just get a supplement in 500mg increments and pop one during lunch if I have yogurt for breakfast, and pop one during breakfast and one during lunch if I go yogurtless for the day. Must build strong bones! Do weight-bearing exercises! Mel smash!

I’ve decided to think of my life as a 125-year project. (Because I think medical science makes it feasible – and also because I like cube numbers.)  The plans you make for the future look way different when you think of it as “wow, 100 years to go.”

And so begins the public chronicle of Project Puppy. I must apologize for the obscurity; we’re still waiting to get consent from our interviewees to be 100% transparent about the whole project, but the short version: Project Puppy is radically transparent engineering education research. What would it mean to run an engineering education project like an open source one – if you assumed an abundance rather than a scarcity  mentality, if you shared rather than hoarded your data, if you welcomed surprises and “uninvited” contributions instead of carefully curating access? What would happen?

At least that’s the lens I’m bringing to it – my other collaborators all come from different backgrounds and perspectives. Linda Vanasupa from Cal Poly started the whole story; some time ago, Linda recorded 8 fascinating interviews, but didn’t have time to go through and analyze them. So she poked Robin Adams at Purdue, who brought up the idea to a few grad students: Joi-Lynn Mondisa (doing mentoring research), Junaid Siddiqui (doing transformation research), Dana Dennick (using conceptual change frameworks), myself (radical transparency and the open source way). And off we ran.

We’ve poked around the data a bit, but today was the first conversation we had about what it might mean to make this an “open research project.” What if we asked our interviewees – there are only 8, after all – for permission to release their transcripts under a Creative Commons license (Linda’s idea) and then did our coding process in public so that people could see what it looked like to do engineering education research?

Sure, there are concerns to deal with (for instance, Junaid brought up the question of what happens if someone does a writeup on “our” data that is a distorted misrepresentation – how would we deal with that?) but this opens up some interesting possibilities. For instance, not only would we have (we hope) some papers, but we’d get out a manageable-sized dataset for coding practice in a qualitative methods research course for anyone who wanted it. We’d be working with questions of open access – which Dana, with her library science background, intellectually understands but doesn’t practice, and which I, with my open source background, practice but may not be fully conscious of. We’d be looking at an interesting model of research mentorship and resource allocation; Robin already mentioned that it was refreshing for her to not be “the boss” of the project, and to not have the pressures of funding breathing down our necks!

In short, it’s an adventure. Now, Project Puppy isn’t about radical transparency per se. It’s a “normal” engineering education research project (on a topic I can’t yet reveal, but Linda’s working on that) we’re trying to conduct in a radically transparent way. My job, in part, is to model this radical transparency for the rest of the group – and so here comes this blog post. More stories to come!

This morning, TuxRadar ran my piece on open source education in Europe (many thanks to Dave Neary for the pointers). I’m also now officially a piece of Purdue propaganda – my work with open source and education was featured in a “5 students who are example makers” profile by Sue Ferringer and also got picked up in the (Purdue) Presidents’ Newsletter. This was, to employ a generic and overused phrase, “really cool.” It also threw me off equilibrium a little bit (though in a positive way, I think) – I’m not used to that kind of attention.

I love how the photographer managed to capture me in can’t-sit-still mode. But it’s still a little weird to look at the website and go “wait, is that me?”  It’s fascinating to see how much gravitas a shiny website, good photos, and snappy text can add. I’m desperately learning how to combat impostor syndrome; I still get overwhelmed, confused, lost, tired – but I am doing awesome things, and I shouldn’t forget that side either. The challenge is to keep my eye on what’s important, following my own internal compass towards learning and doing excellent work, regardless of the circumstances. The more I charge forth into the world, the more important being grounded becomes; I’m trying to build a foundation of being centered and taking time to rest and renew and recalibrate.

And so I read, I stretch, I take the time to cook and eat good food. I’m about to do lunch in a moment, but before doing that, here’s something else that gave me pause today – some folks made a couple comic strips about Hobbes (from Calvin & Hobbes) and Bacon (daughter of Calvin and Susie, named after the philosopher). It’s a beautiful homage. This post has links to all four strips (use the alternate links), and NPR has commentary on them as well as a pointer to Gerry Canavan’s collection of Calvin-as-a-grownup drawings from multiple artists (one is PG-13 NSFW, though if you get depressed at the last strip do see the sequel halfway down the thread here).

I loved Calvin & Hobbes as a child. I still do. And found reading the Hobbes & Bacon strips to be a lovely, bittersweet moment; time moves on and life moves on, and we see others walk the paths we once trod. I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately, and how perpetual adolescence is no longer such a central part of my identity – I’m no longer everyone’s kid sister, I’m taking on more complex roles. And that is strange and new, budding and unfamiliar – and wonderful. It’s amazing how much you can grow when you feel safe, and when you channel your energy towards learning (and the associated discomfort) instead of defense mechanisms. Crazy.

To the people, places, and communities who make me feel safe and grounded, and give me a solid place to fly from and to come back to: thank you.

Get a big bowl. Mix together some plain yogurt (about 2 cups) with a few heaping spoons of mustard (spicy, with the big mustard seeds unbroken) and sriracha (or, I suppose, the hot sauce of your choice). Throw in some pepper and salt and whatever other random spices you like — I used some “southwestern spice blend” my mom had given me, but honestly I think the mustard and sriracha are already plenty. I also lopped in a heaping spoon of finely minced garlic, because I had it around.

It will smell fantastic. Get the chicken bits good and covered with the stuff, throw them in a bowl, wrap in plastic, set in the fridge overnight. Or if you’re me, get caught up by work and leave ‘em there for 2 whole days.

At this point you can take the chicken out and just throw it in a hot oiled skillet and you’ll get this amazing, tender, juicy pan-fried chicken. (I did that for two pieces of chicken because I’d run out of oven-safe containers and I was very, very hungry.) But if you want to go ridiculous, crank the oven to 400F and keep going.

Get some crumby-things. I used extra breadcrumbs from the freezer. The original recipe suggests crushed cornflakes. Maybe you could do cornmeal – not sure. Whatever it is, season it well — I put in some cayenne for heat, but you could probably just do salt and a lot of pepper, and then paprika or whatever you would like — and toss it with a spoon of oil (I used canola) just so it’s a bit moist. Then bread the chicken – the yogurt will make the breading stick beautifully – and put them in pans and put the pans in the oven.

35-40 minutes later, holy shit. Baked chicken, but exploding with flavor and crispy and brown on the outside as if it had been fried, except it’s healthy (sort of — healthier than fried chicken anyway) and with the cayenne giving it a little heat, the mustard seeds crunching satisfyingly, the spices exploding into the juices that flood your mouth when you bite…

Yes, the chicken would be crispier if I’d baked it on a rack instead of in a pan (where the juices made the breading slightly soggy on the bottom). I don’t have a rack. I don’t care. It’s great. I eat mostly vegetarian meals these days (although I’m not a vegetarian) but tonight’s dinner consisted of three giant pieces of chicken and some braised brussels sprouts,  and I couldn’t be more satisfied.

For the sprouts: heat a thin film of oil in a frying pan, cut the sprouts in half and brown them cut-side down over medium-high heat, then pour broth (chicken, vegetable, whatever) into the pan and cover it and let it braise until a fork goes straight through ‘em, then uncover and keep cooking until the liquid evaporates. Done. If you use milk instead of broth and throw some salt/pepper/random-spices in, it’s even better, but I had no milk tonight.

I would totally cook this for a crowd.

And so I drew:

The whiteboard image is a little bleah, but our red-shirted hero(ine) is a New Grad Student dreaming of the Cake of Academic Freedom, only to be reminded by the Advisor of funding and publications – then the Advisor gets backed up by Academics, who shout out the Acronyms of Professional Associations and Accreditation, and even Industry People, who are crunched for money and time and worried about legal matters.

After a short moment of dejection, our hero(ine) has a moment of hope when students appear — alas, they came in to ask about grades rather than learning, leaving our New Grad Student to consider exactly what’s involved in getting that diploma, and ponder whether The Cake Is A Lie…