Posts tagged with "Graduate Studies"
Yesterday, as I was leaving for the weekend, I found out that I passed Cume Exam Numero Cinco. That means I’m done with the cumulative exam aspect of my PhD! Basically I’m just happy not to have to get up on Saturdays anymore (e.g. next Saturday morning). I passed 5 out of 8 that I took. I missed the first one from mono. You’re required to pass 5 out of 20, so I’d say I did pretty well. Anyway, I just wanted to thank everyone for their prayers and support for me trying to get these done ASAP.
Since Lindsay is changing jobs, we decided to put her on my medical insurance through Purdue. It works out really well, because it costs about the same as her coverage at Regions, and it's a pretty good health plan.
I went in on March 17th (remember that date) to sign Lindsay up for insurance. I wrote a check for the first month’s premium, and we were good to go.
The next Saturday, we got a bill in the mail for the period of February 2nd to June 4th, which covers nearly a full two months of time before Lindsay was even covered.
"How did that happen?" you might ask.
Well, there was no place on the form to request an effective date for Lindsay’s coverage. So, the woman processing the claim made the logical assumption to push the effective date back to January 1 of this year.
How dumb is that?! It’s ridiculous that Purdue would send me a bill like this when:
1.) I had already paid for my coverage for February and March.
and
2.) I didn’t even apply until mid-March!
If anything had happened to Lindsay in that time frame, you can bet Purdue wouldn’t have helped out! They’re fixing it now, but I’m still a little frustrated! Make sure you pay attention to your bills...you never know what could be on there.
We didn’t watch the Oscars last night, but we were excited to see that “Crash” won Best Picture! I think Crash was an excellent movie, and I highly suggest it to anyone who hasn’t seen it. It has significant amounts of cursing and racial slams, but it has a really good message and story.
In other news, I definitely failed my cume exam last weekend. I studied hard for the biochem test’s rather vague “enzyme kinetics” topic, but it was even harder than I envisioned. That was a no-go. Dr. Lytle (from the “class from hell”) wrote the analytical test all about statistics. Organic, Inorganic, and Physical chemistry are almost always no-go’s for me. So, I had about a 0% chance of passing any of the exam choices.
In addition to that, we had to be in Indianapolis for Megan’s choir concert (see previous post) later that day.
After looking at the exams for about 15-20 minutes, I made the wise decision to throw in the towel. There was no reason to waste two hours failing an exam.
I’ve now taken 7 cume exams and passed 4 (making the obvious assumption that I failed the last one). That means I have 2 more tries this year to get my fifth and final pass. If I don’t do that, I’ll have ten more tries next year to pass that last one. Hopefully I’ll have good news in a few weeks!
Church is going VERY WELL!!!! Our times of musical worship have been amazing! I simply can not express the freedom and openness that people feel in worshipping God individually, without regard to anyone else’s opinions, stares, etc. We have new people coming every week, and they all seem to have been brought to our church directly by God for a specific purpose.
There’s too much to describe here, but God is definitely on the move! Our small group is also going very well. Two members of my research group have taken me up on invitations to attend, and I think both have had good times of fellowship and learning.
I’m also trying to get webhosting set up for our church. I’ve never gone through the process of setting up a website from scratch, so it’s been an interesting time of research. I hope to add new features throughout the Spring and Summer that church members and friends around the country can use a resources for their Christian walk.
That’s it for now….Later!
As expected, I passed my fourth cumulative exam. That means I have only one more to go before I’m done with those tests. I have 13 tries to pass my last one. I think I'll be alright. ( :
Tomorrow night, we are having the first youth small group for Purpose Driven Life at our house. So tonight will be busy with preparation. Our “young adults” small group is going very very well. I invited several of my friends from Purdue, and some have already decided to come. A labmate named Hao, his wife and daughter all came last week, and they had a great time! They’ve decided to come back again this week. Also, another labmate named Ayanna has expressed strong interest in coming this week. Lindsay also invited some co-workers and customers from the bank and several have expressed interest in coming as well.
Our church really seems like it’s about to grow exponentially. That’s all for now.
This week I had to give the Tuesday and Thursday lectures for CHM 111. This is a class of a few hundred students that meets in one of the biggest classrooms on Purdue’s campus. On Tuesday, I had about 2 hours notice that I was lecturing. I thought that was bad, but I only got about 20 minutes warning for the Thursday lecture!
The topics were not that difficult (naming compounds, molarity, etc), but it was still a little tough to present it to that many people. It’s a course where a lot of the students don’t care or don’t get it. But I think that I made it clearer and more relavent to the students than the normal professor does. I’ve also been working on getting a website up and running for our church. Right now it’s not much, but I hope to have it spiffed up with more features soon.
I passed my third cume exam. I’ve taken five and passed three…leaving me 14 tries to pass 2 more tests. I will very likely pass the one coming up this weekend because it’s over a topic that I know fairly well. If so, that would leave me 13 tries to pass one test. So, I’m in good shape. Hopefully I will be done before this school year is over; that woud be sweet!
Also, I may get published again very soon. This time it would be in the more prestigious journal “Analytical Chemistry.” Again, I didn’t write hardly any of it; but it’s nice to get included in a few papers early on.
Tomorrow I get a take home exam for the beloved CHM 621 (aka “the class from hell”). I’ve heard that even with a whole week to finish the exam, you end up spending all night every night working on it. Fun stuff!
I’m sorry that we haven’t kept you all updated as much lately. Church, work and school have been fast-paced the last few weeks. Later.
My research advisor, Dr. Cooks, was on an online radio show yesterday called “Science and Society.”
He was interviewed about the basics of our field, mass spectrometry, and its applications. Listening to it may provide some understanding about the basics of mass spec and what our group does specifically. However, I must warn you that the interviewers’ questions were not very good…I wouldn’t have even known how to answer them. ( :
Feel free to take a listen if you'd like to know more about what I do each day.
Over the summer, a fellow member of the Cooks group and I submitted a “short communication” to the Journal of the American Society of Mass Spectrometry (JASMS). It has recently become available online, so I thought I would post an electronic copy for everyone to see…
For those who don’t know much about this type of journal, this is a “communication” which is basically a really short paper. Typical articles are much longer and much more involved. This one just explains an interesting phenomena that we saw over the summer.
Also, I must give Amy the majority of the credit. She wrote virtually the entire article. However, it’s still cool to finally have my name on something.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| firstarticle.pdf | 165.78 KB |
He got the highest score in his class! Way to go, hubby!
On a different note, we’re going on our first married vacation! Mom and Dad bought us a few nights at a bed and breakfast in Nashville, Indiana! We’re giong to walk around the trails, visit the shops, eat at the diners, and hang out in BEAUTIFUL Brown County… We can’t wait.
Oh, and Kyle’s new girlfriend, Kim, is here to visit! She’s very nice, and we love her so far! ( :
I did really well on my first grad school test. After three weeks of waiting for my score, I found out that I did much better than expected! Just thought I’d share.
Do you like us? Well? Do ya? Do ya?
Love Mercy
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