The Big H!!

I'm going Boston for sure!!! =D haha now I just need to decide which uni to go to...

The Return of the K

Wow, where to start?

People sense the passage of time by the number of events that happen; the more things that occur the longer a day seems to feel, and in this sense my trip felt much longer than a mere week and a half. So much happened that awed, excited and challenged, and I come back feeling like I'm completed a pilgrimage.

I've decided to chronicle events semi-chronologically, with random digressions here and there about things that caught my attention. Bear with my boy-meets-world style of writing, it usually is the way I approach new experiences...with a sense of awe.

And one more thing: as I was packing I noticed that I had left my camera charger in Malaysia when I went back for Chinese New Year = low camera battery = few or no photos.

T_T

P.S. For the uninitiated, this was a week and a half trip to the USA for graduate school interviews. Warning: long entry.

Feb 8 – Unprepared:
Februaries in Cambridge (UK – importance of clarifying this is greatly heightened during my trip) are pleasant affairs, where the spring sunshine sashays in and gently leads winter out the door. For some reason I assumed the weather in Boston to be similar, and didn’t bother either asking my friends currently there, or even checking the weather on the internet. Assumption: 10 degrees Celcius, and I packed accordingly.

As my earlier post mentioned, I found an internet terminal in Changi while I was waiting for my flight. After checking my email, I idly decided to finally look up the weather forecast.

Boston: Min -5 degrees C, Max 2 degrees C.

Urgh.

Feb 8 – United Airlines: Singapore to Tokyo, Tokyo to Chicago, Chicago to Boston:
It’s been the longest journey ever. All in all, I spent 33 hours in airports and airplanes; this served nicely as a prelude to screwing up my biological clock completely, given that Boston is approximately on the opposite side of the globe from Singapore.

Actually, United Airlines wasn’t as bad as my friends said. There was a surprising amount of leg space, there were fairly few people flying (and hence I got to sleep across 3 seats). Service was acceptable, food alright, and for the flight to Japan at least there was a cute Japanese stewardess =P

Feb 8 – Arrival in Boston. Start of Harvard recruitment weekend.
I arrive in Logan International Airport in Boston, step out and stop dead in my tracks.

IT IS COLD.

Thankfully, Harvard will pay for a cab fare to the airport, haha. This you will see sets the theme for the entire trip: university spending big money on small recruit. Consider the destination: the Sheraton hotel in Cambridge (US) =D

Which brings up a matter that requires clarification: Harvard (and MIT as well) is situated in Cambridge (US), a town next to Boston. According to someone I asked, the people who founded Harvard University thought that the town it is situated in should have a scholarly sounding name, and hence plucked the name Cambridge from Cambridge University in the UK. A lot of self-introduction goes on during the next few days, and everytime people state which university they are from:

Me: “I’m from Cambridge”
Other person: “…”
*moment of silence, I learn later expecting me to continue with an ‘MIT’ or ‘Harvard’*
Me: “…”
Other person: “…”
Me: “I’m from Cambridge University in the UK.”
Other person: “Ohhhh….”

Anyways I arrive at the Sheraton Commander Hotel, which is so named because George Washington once visited some spot near it, I think. It’s a good choice, since apart from being a high-class hotel meant to impress recruits, it’s got big red glowing letters on the outside visible from half a kilometre away, which easily acts as a beacon to blur recruits wandering around like lost sheep.

Check in; nice big room! 2 queen-sized beds (me plus one roommate) with FIVE pillows each (arabic numerals can’t convey emphasis the way capital letters can), on top of all the trappings expected of a Sheraton room. This is NICE. but don’t get too used to it. Another recruit and I later agreed: this will be the only time we (future) grad students will be staying here; grad students are generally poor bastards scavenging to get by.

I join the reception down in the meeting room; a group of graduate students have come to talk to all the recruits staying in the hotel. I meet some people and promptly forget their names; by now the jetlag and long flight have taken their toll on me and I sit in a zombie-like daze listening to other people talking. Nice selection of food and drinks (another point to note), but I’ve no appetite. Oh but I meet my roommate, a Princeton guy named Drew, whose girlfriend is also here as a recruit; how cute, they applied together to the same unis, and their principal investigator (PI, guy whose lab you work in) actually wrote their references recommending them as a pair.

I head up to my room soon and promptly fall asleep.

And wake up at 12am. And again at 2am. And 4am. And 6am. Hmmm.

Feb 9,10 – Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB), Harvard University:
Early morning greets the recruits as we gather in the lobby for our guides (one of who pleasantly sings a greeting to us). We walked from the hotel to the department, and I continually lose heat from my scalp. I have no gloves, no hat, no scarf, and only a thin autumn jacket. The others note wryly that half my sentences are exclamations of cold. I brought along a cup of hot chocolate, thinking that it’d warm me up, not realizing that I need a hand out of my pocket to hold the cup. Some graduate students think it helps by telling me that it’s actually a surprisingly mild winter.

…………..

Aaaaaaaaanyways, we enter the department to inviting warmth and a generous spread of pastries, cookies, spreads, fruits and drinks. This is breakfast, and it looks incredible. Money spent on recruits.

We meet the faculty, they introduce the program, and 2 hours later we break for tea, where the food and drink outside have been topped up. More talks, and we break for lunch. The recruits surmise that between the early mornings, the long talks and the endless food diverting blood from the brain to the stomach, the department is clearly planning to dumb us recruits down for the afternoon interviews, to numb our minds and hence better able to penetrate our defences and learn what fools we really are.

HAH, they’re wasting their time. My jetlag is doing all that and more already.

Sure enough, in the afternoon I start staring vacuously into space, and my mind feels like warm jelly. I start each interview with a disclaimer: Hi there Professor X, I just flew in from Singapore yesterday, on a 30 hour journey, and am still functioning half a day out of sync. The slime mold you see now is not representative of the capabilities of the guy you’re going to recruit into your department. He thinks much better, I think. Yeah.

Of interviews:
I (and some other recruits) had been speculating on the nature of the interviews we would face. We were certain that they would be hard, intense affairs, with the professors asking pointed questions about our research:

Prof: “So tell me about your research.”
Recruit: “Uh well I work on blah blah blah….”
Prof: “Oh that’s interesting. But tell me why you use this technique on this gene?”
Recruit: “Uh…well I think because it’s blah blah….”
Prof: “YOU STUPID FOOL!! I WILL EAT YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL!!!”

The whole thing can only end in tears.

Of course, we ask the graduate students what the interviews will be like. They say don’t worry, the professors are nice, but we all know graduate students are on the side of the professors, who grade the students. In fact, later on one professor does talk to us about interviews, about how he knows we each have our 5-10 minute shield, our little summary about what we do. He KNOWS?!

My first interviewer does ask me some questions about what I do, but after a while starts talking about HER research, which is good since it means I don’t have to talk and look like a fool. This is symptomatic of most professors actually, and later on in other universities there ARE sessions where all I do is listen to the professor talk.

But more surprisingly a third of the time the professor actually asks: “So how can I persuade you to join our department?” A prestigious university soliciting ME to join them? Somehow it feels wrong; I imagined the correct state of things would have involved the recruit begging for the honour of washing test tubes. But yeah! They mention sailing, do I like sailing? There are free sailing lessons on the Charles River. The weather isn’t all that bad, I stayed here for 20 years, I’m sure you’d like it too. All us faculty care deeply for students, you can approach us for anything you need.

In short, the interviews are actually two-way dialogues, each party courting the other, I imagine much like marriage, as it involves similar lengths of time (5 years for a Ph.D) living with each other. It’s a curious dance, with them realising those who make it to the interviews probably did make it to interviews at other universities as well, and we realising that they have a pool of recruits to choose from, of which they take typically 60-70%.

My mind however screams horror at me going into an interview with Harvard professors in my zombie-like state. I blink on the order of seconds, and sentences enter my brain with a significant lag, not helped by the halving of processing power. I’ve also got that foolish smile on my face, the one that you have when you’re very sleepy, and hence contract your cheek muscles in the hope that upturned edges automatically make a smile.

More often you just look like a doofus.

Feb 11 – Gearing up, Migration to MIT
Well that’s it for the Sheraton, god knows when I’ll ever stay there again. I meet some friends (Linjuan and Herman) for lunch, and drag them shopping with me - need winter accessories.

Because weather forecast for Feb 12: huge blizzard that will engulf the northeastern United States.

Everything’s on sale, which is good. I pick out gloves, a scarf and for the first time in my life, a hat! (well if you don’t count the cap I had to wear as part of the Boys’ Brigade uniform in secondary school). Along with the hat comes hat hair, which is a novel problem. But the hat is AWESOME. It’s got a face mask that I can pull down to shield my face from the wind; check it out:

I look like a terrorist, or bank robber…haha….

I travel two Metro stops (Boston equivalent of Tube or MRT) down to MIT. MIT is SO COOL!! They’ve just got this coolness factor built into the culture that other schools don’t have. Case in point: Linjuan shows me this contraption that MIT installed in the Metro station next to their campus. It consists of big chimes located in between the tracks, with several hammers poised to strike the chimes. There’s a lever on the platform that you can reach, which is connected to the hammers.

Moving the lever causes the hammers to move, ever so slightly. The game is to time the lever movements to resonate with the hammers, building amplitude and eventually striking the chimes, which results in a surprisingly delicate but beautiful cascade of notes wafting through the station. Very very cool.

I meet the other recruits (for MIT) and MIT graduate students in their 1st year party room; equipped with a pool table!! Plus for MIT, since Harvard didn’t have one. Had dinner with the guy whose house I was staying in – decided to stay at a grad student’s house instead of a hotel, just to see how grad student housing is like. Oh and met up with Juliana and Yiqi (another A*STAR scholar), who were also going for MIT interviews.

Feb 12 – Blizzarded!
I wake up in the morning, glance out the window and the snowstorm from hell stares back. Man. The snow’s not the gentle dusting we get in Cambridge (UK), but a proper, kill-you-if-you’re-homeless-outside type. It’s very very cold, the wind’s fairly strong…looking out the snow looks like how it would be if you were in one of the tiny houses in a shaken snowglobe.

It’s a 15min trek to the department. Wow, the snow’s about 2 feet deep. I step out of the house and my leg promptly sinks into the snow, up to mid-calf level. Interesting. The city is deserted. There is NO ONE else apart from us on the streets. There are no cars on the road. It really looks like the city has been desolate and abandoned for years, and the snow just makes the whole thing all the more eerie. I pass cars entombed in snow and ice – good luck to the owners.

We spend most of the day at the department idling. There was a lot planned: trips to Boston, tours around the campus etc, but the snowstorm’s put killed all plans. Some of us trudge off to watch Good Night and Good Luck at the local cinema…the 15 min trek there was an adventure.

Which brings up a point, how come so few of this year’s Oscar-nominated shows are showing in Singapore? Good Night and Good Luck (about McCarthy and the communist witch hunts) and Crash don’t seem to be coming, while Capote and Munich haven’t arrived yet.

Update: a new blizzard has hit the northeastern US again, just a day after I get back. This time temperatures are Max -2C, Min -12C. Do I really want to be here for 5 years? Hmm.

Feb 13 – MIT interviews, UCSF phone interview.
Had interviews today, and my first was with Harvey Lodish! He’s the guy who wrote the textbook on Cell Biology, ie he’s responsible for most undergrads’ knowledge of biology. The interviews went better than the ones in Harvard, since I was starting to get over my jetlag. Haha, also, I had earlier arranged to take a phone interview from University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the MIT party room…somehow it felt WRONG.

And the phone interview was jarring. The 4 professors on the line actually asked detailed questions, like why did I use this technique? What results did I expect to see? What’s the function of this gene? I was caught off guard, and I think I babbled out answers without really giving much thought. Awkward pauses dominated the conversation; without seeing each other, we didn’t know how to cue the other party to resume the conversation. At the end of the half hour interview I hung up sure that I had lost UCSF. Ah well.

Update: In fact, yesterday one of the UCSF professors emailed me saying sorry for the awkward phone interview (this email part of my acceptance email =P but I’m jumping ahead of myself, haha).

Dinner with a Nobel Laureate:
We were split into groups for dinner, several recruits with a few faculty each, and my group had Bob Horwitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, 2002! In fact, I was seated with him along with 2 other recruits, and for the entire dinner we were peppering him with questions about winning the Nobel Prize…just so, you know, we’d be prepared (haha kidding!!!).

Apparently he was attending someone’s wedding at some ski resort in France, and so the call from Stockholm (where they announce the Nobel Prize for Medicine) was routed there from his lab in the USA. However, the host (who picked up the phone) spoke no English or Swedish, and didn’t understand what the caller was saying. He got across to Bob the fact that he had a call from Stockholm, however….but apparently it’s a popular prank amongst scientists to call up their friends on that day pretending to be Swedish and telling them they won the Nobel Prize.

So Bob (this seems wrong….I should be calling him Professor Horwitz, but all the professors we meet insist that we call them by their first names) sits down with the radio and TV on the whole day, waiting for a public announcement.

When they later meet, the chair of the committee tells Bob that he was feeling down; there were 3 winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine that year, and the chair whose job was to call the winners didn’t manage to get any of them.

Another anecdote: The Nobel committee is bound by strict rules to call earliest at 11.30am Stockholm time, which translates to about 3am in the morning in the USA. Hence a professor’s wife picks up the early morning call:

Wife: “Who is this?”
Nobel committee: “We are calling from Stockholm, and we need to speak to your husband.”
Wife: “Yeah right.”
Nobel committee: “No no really we really have an important message that we need to give your husband.”
Wife: “Yeah right.”

Apparently this goes on for a while, before they convince her to get her husband.

Feb 14 – Valentine’s Day in Baltimore
I catch a flight to Baltimore, alone, since I’m the only one from the group in MIT going for Johns Hopkins interviews on that day. I get this Russian cab driver from the airport (again, paid for by the university) who starts warning me about Baltimore being the crime capital of the United States. Apparently murders used to occur once every day, but they’ve now got it down to twice every 3 days. Nice. But that’s why Johns Hopkins is so good: they’ve got tons of gunshot wounds and trauma cases to practice on.

The hotel is nice, only 4 storeys but definitely 4 star. I lament spending Valentine’s Day alone in a crime-ridden city in a foreign land, but ah well. Thankfully, I call the admissions officer to announce my arrival, and she says that there are two other applicants meeting two graduate students for dinner, and would I like to join them? Definitely!

Feb 15 – Johns Hopkins Medical School
The medical campus is HUGE. It consists of the heart of the city, with many interconnected buildings and affiliated hospitals. Apparently Johns Hopkins is the biggest employer in the state of Maryland, outside the government. There are like close to a thousand labs, in contrast to Harvard Medical School’s 300 or so…Johns Hopkins as a professor tells me is the biggest medical school in the USA, focussing largely on research applied to human disease. It offers a nice contrast to Harvard MCB and MIT Biology, which are small departments focussed on basic research.

Not much to say about the interviews, fairly standard affairs, but just walking from one building to another…the sheer size of the place is hard to comprehend. Some graduate students have told me that they chose to join small departments cos in a big medical school you might find yourself drowning in the crowd. Hmmm.

Anyways I took a flight back to Boston in the evening, popped by Leah’s place to chat. One of the more animated people I know, haha it’s always interesting to talk to her. In return for wasting her time when she's got a research proposal due the next day she rewards me with 19 books to carry back for her.

Feb 17 – Flight back and delays galore; unexpected detour in Japan!
At 3am I decide to head out, back to Logan airport for my flight back at 7am. It turns out to be even more of an adventure than my flight from Singapore to Boston.

I reach the airport, only to find out my flight from Boston to Los Angeles is delayed, which would cause me to miss the connecting Los Angeles to Tokyo flight. Hence the airline puts me on a 9am flight to Chicago instead, from where I’ll connect to Tokyo. Great, more time in the airport.

I reach Chicago, to find a thunderstorm brewing. This delays the flight out to Tokyo by 2 hours, and yup, it means that when I reach Tokyo in the evening, the flight to Singapore has already left.

My sianness is tempered however, by the fact that the airline is putting us up at a hotel for the night, to catch a flight at 11am the next day. This means I’m actually gonna spend a night in Japan!! Score!!!! I can’t help laughing out loud as I leave the airport for the hotel, and step into Japan proper (and not just lingering in the transit area). It’s my first time in Japan!! The hotel’s only 10 mins away from the airport, and it turns out to be yet another free stay at a 4 star hotel. Dinner’s provided, and I head up to the Japanese restaurant for what will be my first authentic Japanese meal in my life.

Which turns out to be….interesting. The miso soup and chawanmushi are good, but rice is served with sashimi, which tastes…different from the ones back home. It tastes even more raw than those I’ve tried here, and the raw tuna especially tasted weird. True to Japanese form (in the sense of doing gimmicky things), the orange they served is halved, the flesh cut into regular octamers and placed back in the skin, which then looks like a bowl.

By then it’s 9pm, and I decide to take the free shuttle to downtown Narita. On the bus I strike up a conversation with an American United air stewardess, who firstly warns me that there’s nothing to do in Narita at this hour. All the shops are closed, and there’s not much difference from any other regular city. She turns out to be correct, and I pace up and down the streets to find that everything’s closed. Some things catch my attention however; I enter a Pachinko shop (some sort of Japanese slot machine) and see a few people playing at this hour….I also enter a Japanese minimart, looking for quirky Japanese food products.






Note the typical Japanese approach to English grammar.



This is a 3 litre paper carton of sake! It’s huge…I put my hand there for a sense of the size, but it doesn’t come out well in the photo.




Ah well, not much to see. Will have to come back and visit Japan proper one day.

More interesting Japanese stuff in my hotel toilet. See the console next to the toilet bowl?


It’s a control panel for a spray system, that shoots jets of water to clean your….posterior after you….well I think the illustrations explain it all, hahahahaha.


Results are….interesting. But very clean. Maybe this will one day be to toilet paper what toilet paper was to leaves.

Crazy Japanese game shows:
At night I switch on the TV, flipping through channels. One catches my eye.

It’s this game show, where the contestants are out on a soccer field. The contestant stands in front of the goal in the penalty box, and there’s a goalkeeper in front of the goal. Apparently the idea is for someone to kick the ball in from the corner, and the contestant has to head the ball into the goal. Innocent enough.

But the goalkeeper is wearing a full body protection suit, the type firefighters wear, and the contestants are wearing helmets. Ah ha, the plot thickens! The twist: the ball is soaked in fuel and lighted with a blowtorch. The contestant is supposed to head a fireball.

One guy does his manly gorilla roar before his turn, then promptly runs away when the ball flies towards him. Another guy manages to head the ball in, goal!! But his head catches on fire, and he runs around like a chicken as the game show staff try to chase him with fire extinguishers.

Hahahahahaha seeing the show is way more funny than I can describe it here. Crazy Japanese!!

Feb 18 – Replies!! JAL is good!!
This is the first hotel breakfast I’ve had which serves baked salmon. Btw the abundance of pictures of Japan is due to my guarded usage of the camera and cameraphone during the trip, but now I can just drain the batteries without care. So here’s a picture of my breakfast. They’ve a mini Japanese garden outside where I take a walk after.

My flight back is in the morning, this time with Japan Airlines. I arrive at the airport with time to kill, and discover an internet terminal. Check my email…..two new emails stand out, with UCSF and MIT in the titles. Click click.

I GOT INTO MIT!!!! And UCSF!!! Wahhhhh I’ve somewhere to go for grad school!!! I’m more surprised at getting UCSF than MIT, considering how badly I thought the interview went. Haha I couldn’t help but feel cheery for the entire day. Now only if the other two schools would get back to me, *fingers crossed*. Will delay deciding where to go till I get all my replies, but even if I get rejected by the others, at least I’ve somewhere to go now!!

And the flight back. Wow, JAL is really good. There’s tons of leg room. The personal entertainment system is a generation ahead of SIA’s, with a snazzy interactive menu. Airplane earphones are usually crap, with lots of static etc, but not for JAL. Because the earphones provided are made by SONY. The sound comes through crisp and clear, like any quality earphones. Food is good. And the cute Japanese air stewardesses =P. They’re all really short though.

I watch the Godfather on the way back, been meaning to watch it for some time, cos I’ve heard so much about it, being on everyone’s list of all time top movies. I found it boring though, surprisingly. Hmmm. I skip Godfather II and decide to just sleep.

Touchdown in Singapore, and back to life here.
It feels weird to be back, and now as I’m slumped on my couch typing this I feel like the events of the past week and a half seem so distant. But something’s changed: now I know where (roughly) I’ll be heading towards for the next stage in my life. I was watching Just Like Heaven on the plane from Chicago, and reading Tuesdays with Morrie (a birthday gift from a friend), both hitting on the theme of carpe diem…hmm yup I’ve decided to make the most of this half a year I have left here.

I Found Internet!!!!!

I'm at Changi Terminal 2....alone....and the shops are closing...was walking around alone till I found an internet terminal!!! Haha it's now 12.15am, my flight's at 7.15am....I forgot to factor in my waiting time at Changi, so my whole journey is about 36 hours I think....wah....

Off again!

I'm 24!! Two turns of the chinese zodiac; it's now the year of the dog again. So old....but as Allan pointed out, haha 24 is the name of my fav TV show, so at least now I've something in common with Jack Bauer...remote as it may be....got an incredible CD from the lousy guys in Cambridge, with all their lousy faces on it...hahahaha thanks dudes!! The walk down St Andrew's to Christ's was magic....

And I'm flying off to Boston tomorrow morning! Actually I'm going to go to Changi airport tonight, and wait till 5am to check in...Hmm travel plans: Feb 8-11 Harvard interview, 12-14 MIT, 15-16 Johns Hopkins (in Baltimore), and flying back to Singapore on the 16th...That burns a full 8 days of my leave...T_T the pain, the pain....I think that leaves me with about 3 more days of leave till the end of my attachment in July....gonna be in Baltimore alone, apparently it has one of the highest crime rates in the USA...hmmm......

And I'm not properly packed yet...never been so unprepared for a trip, just started packing clothes yesterday....still have documents and papers to print, miscellaneous electronics and toiletries to pack...and I need to get some quality reading material, cos I'm flying United....wanted SIA but the uni wouldn't pay for it, cos SIA's double the price....

United's ok as well right? I mentioned I was flying United to my lab mates, and:
1) Sorrowful expression: Oh no! I HATE United!
2) Their seats very small!
3) The angmohs like to sit sideways and thus it's very squeezy
4) NO. PERSONAL. TV. NONE. I'm going to DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
5) Service sucks.
6) As if all these not enough, apparently air stewardessess not pretty.

T_T

Update: I just realised that I'll be spending 26 hours in planes and at airports in transit (2 transits!!).... 26 hours with all the above .....URGH....