Say What?

That's the first thought that comes to my mind when I see this picture. 

Want another perspective on the first year of graduate school? I have included all my facebook statuses from the past year, because what better way to remember life than through facebook?

And before you freak out: this post looks inanely long, but there's not much actual content in it.

The boring "I'm in school" statuses:

I piece of my soul died last week when I realized that I was officially a student at the University of Iowa....and I almost cried.

First week of graduate school...in the books.

Yes, I wore my ISU stuff to work (at the U of I) yesterday/last night. Yes, I got some strange looks from all the hawk fans as I was leaving work at 7:30 a.m. Yes, I will be wearing it again when I work tomorrow. No, I don't give a hoot about football, but I still want to say...Go State!

 I still prefer Iowa State

Done with my first semester of graduate school! I still managed to make today's one to one at work was incredibly productive, sans homework: My unread posts in Google Reader went from 463 to 358!

I ♥ Chobani. I do not ♥ Biostatistics.

WebCT (ISU) has a far superior histogram function that ICON (UofI). I could spend hours on WebCT splitting the sections into smaller and smaller ranges. Icon has lame, boring, permanent ranges.

There are papers:

Yay! My paper was moved back a week. Now I have all of next week to continue procrastinating on my assessment of adequate pre-natal care...

A random Disney song popping up in my itunes playlist while I'm writing a "serious" paper...makes me happy.

One presentation down. To go: a paper, another presentation, another paper, and a test. All done by Dec 8 and then I'm free!!!!

 Fv\ #${EFCC43 <----Zephyr's kindly contribution to my research paper. I think it means that he knows a lot more about the subject than I do and that I should just turn it in like that and play frisbee instead.

Social stigma and health. 3 pages. Go. 

 I have determined-through a purely random and unscientific study-that the Iowa State Daily is much better than the Daily Iowan. However, the Daily Iowan contains a New York Times crossword which slightly lessons the enormous gap between the papers. 

And other homework:

I shall be productive, I shall be productive, I shall be productive [taps pens together 3 times]....yeah, it's not working

Got a lot of cleaning done today. Yes kids,sometimes avoiding homework has good outcomes.

Actually reading my textbook. And taking notes. I'm pretty much an outstanding student.....for tonight anyway.

I just pulled out my biostats notes from this morning. The only thing I wrote: "probabilities suck."

Am I the only one that thinks it's a little strange when professors assign journal articles they authored as required reading?

Note to self: studying in a hospital stairwell results in too many doctors stopping to ask if I'm okay. Apparently "normal" people don't sit in stairwells.

I just want to read something that I do not have to discuss in class, cite in a paper, or otherwise mentally manipulate. And please please please let me have just one week where I am not required to look at a single journal article.

Just think...if I had a snuggie I wouldn't have to take my arms out from under my blanket to turn the pages on my book. But alas, i have no snuggie. 

I've learned the importance of sleep and food:

Dear brain and body: For the past week you haven't been getting along...I can't sleep and then I'm exhausted and then I still can't sleep. I can't form coherent comments for school anymore and I hardly have the energy to stand up. But can we please please please call a truce for a few hours so I can finish this paper? I promise that as soon as I am done the battle may resume in full force.
All my appreciation
Lisa

Thought I had myself sorted out...but I just woke up from a 2 hour nap that I initially fought quite heavily. I suppose I needed it? I am probably still a couple nights short on my sleep...

Apparently I was more tired than I thought after work this morning. Since I slept through a couple alarms....and subsequently missed class. 

 So much for the claims on my electric blanket that it wouldn't wear out like "other" ones. Only one year old and there's just one corner that really heats up well. Although, I do put my blankets through a lot of wear.

I have spent over half of 2011 asleep. I think I'm off to a good start. 

This morning I awoke to find Zephyr sleeping on two of my pillows and a pile of blankets...while I had a sheet, and no pillows.

I do love sleeping on couches. Kind of makes me question why I spent money on a bed. 

Likes Hummus. A lot. A whole whole lot. An entire metric ton of love for hummus.

I was walking through the produce section and saw a sign for pink lady apples next to a sign for gala apples. For a moment I was really excited thinking that there was a lady gaga variety of apples... 

 Somewhere along the line I missed the lesson that a toaster oven will burn me just as easily as a real oven...ouch!

It's relieving to know that my 100% apple juice is both lactose AND gluten free. 

Having an adventure attempting to make my own pumpkin puree from a fresh pumpkin. What have I learned so far? It's really easy...except for the cutting part. I don't have a single knife suitable for cutting a pumpkin in half. 

 There is my dog (Zephyr/Zefir depending on what I feel like typing that day):

I don't think Zefir realizes what a delicate flower I am.

I'm sick of Zefir walking all over me....and my homework, laptop, bed, cell phone, journal articles, backpack, couches, and every other delicate thing I own.

Once again I have Zefir's immense help on a paper. I'm beginning to think that he should be the one in grad school and that I should be the one playing with tennis balls and squeaky toys all day long. 

 I think my parents have implanted something in Zephyr's brain. He barks at family guy but not any other tv shows. He insists on lying between me and matt when we're together. Wonder what other moral guidelines in me he's keeping in check?

On Monday Zephyr popped my stability ball. Today I bought a new stability ball...and Zephyr just popped it.

 There has been a lot of work:

 I love that the hospital's electronic charting system is called EPIC. I get to say EPIC a lot every day.....really, I say the word EPIC an EPIC amount!

Work work workity work 

What to do with myself before work? Surely one shouldn't be productive...

  Busy night. Among other things...One patient tried to kiss me. Another tried a few pickup lines. The third called me a heifer.

Just paid all my bills for the month. A little depressing to do all at once, but rather relieving in the sense that I don't have to think about any of them for another month! 

I make somewhat of an irresponsible adult.

 And there are the random, rambling thoughts from Lisa's brain (hold onto your hats ladies and gents):

 Of the 99 counties in Iowa, Keokuk County ranks 3rd from the end with percentage of adults (25 and older) with a bachelor's degree. Is it people not getting degrees or higher educated people moving away? 

I officially hate the word "jegging"

  Please excuse me while I go bang my head on the sidewalk until I forget all the results of the election.

What the hell have I been doing to myself the past few years??!? World, take heed, the old Lisa has returned!! 

Visitors: Please do not feed the ego. 

I'm a bitch. 

‎...yes, I expect to live forever, but I just don't have time to wait! 

Highlight of my day: I was looking at the clock at 1:11 on 1/11 

‎"just last week I was sitting on my couch and now I'm here." Me too! Well said reality tv contestant. Well said. 

Apparently I forgot to put my last name on a rebate form because the rebate card was sent to "Lisa No Name"

 Flipping through a Better Homes and Gardens magazine I read this: "Experts agree that the toughest school transitions are from elementary to middle school, middle to high school, and high school to college." ....and what other school transitions are there...???

Just signed up for netflix. This will either be a brilliant move or a disastrous mistake 

 My facebook wall is filled with posts by me. I am either a friendless jerk or...well, a friendless jerk?

Have a lovely Thursday, all!

Never Fear

I am still here. And alive. And an mph student.

I've had an interesting 3 months. I had some time away from school and the month since then has been filled with catching up from that. But I've completed my first year! It feels good. I honestly can say that every day I study public health I love it even more.

And now it's summer! Sort of. I am currently taking a 3-week class. It goes from 9-12:40 Monday-Thursday for 3 weeks. Intense, for sure, but I have actually been enjoying fully immersing myself in one topic. The class is Health Communication, which I have always found fascinating. I love human relationships. It's definitely what I want to do with my life--work with people.

Aren't they just the most adorable little cacti you've ever seen?

I am continuing to work. Zephyr has an unprecedented amount of energy (I took him for a run today and since we returned 2 hours ago he has continued to sprint through the house, throw toys in my face, and jump on my laptop). The weather has been to die for. I have planted my garden. I have finally seen the light in regards to my inability to properly water house plants and switched to succulents. I went to the NAMI (National Alliance of the Mentally Ill) Walk with my coworkers. I went to Ames and sent my boyfriend Matt off to Europe (what a loser, who goes to Europe when there are awesome 3-week classes to go to back here???) I found out I'm lactose intolerant (this really sucks since I LOVE milk products....except milk...I really don't like milk). Realized just how much of a genius my little brother is (seriously....check out his website and remember that he's a sophomore in high school). And two of my best friends got engaged!

I'm sure there's so much more that has happened, but I'll leave it at that since I have a lot of reading to do for class tomorrow morning. Hope everyone's having a great summer!

NEDAW

And after my last post about my decision to write a paper on eating disorder relapse I remembered that it's National Eating Disorder Awareness Week!

Today I Woke Up...

...with a dog on my head.

Okay, that has nothing to do with the rest of this post, but it was a strange way to wake up.

Actually I wanted to write about writing papers. Yay! (I just finished my first paper of the semester this morning)

I believe a couple weeks ago I wrote a post about how I was graded in classes. In case you didn't notice, papers are highly prominent. Particularly long, involved, research papers. Or a series of smaller papers that all add up into one long, involved, research paper. Key words there: long, involved, research. Meaning I can't just sit down a couple days before the due date a whip something out.

So how do I start? And how do I keep from getting buried in the work?
Tiny steps. I always start work on the paper on the day it's assigned. This doesn't mean I start research and writing on the first day of classes (blasphemy!). It typically involves something benign like narrowing down and/or choosing a topic. I am terrible at choosing topics; probably because I am terrible at making decisions. So starting early gives me plenty of time to suck it up and decide. I don't really have a system for topic decisions. I usually look at the professor's directions ("a health related behavior?"....there's a lot of those) and think about what I am interested in researching. I write down those areas. For example:

• Mental Health
• Rural Health
• Primary Care

Then I go through and brainstorm topics within those larger areas that fit the required paper topic:

• Sleep and mental health
• Nutrition and mental health
• Exercise and mental health
• Mental health in rural areas (two areas of interest!!)
• Preventing eating disorder relapse
• Nutrition

As you can see, some are narrower than others, some have a specific health-related behavior, others will take some more brainstorming. Eventually I force myself to choose one from the list. Sometimes I'm smart and think to look at the available literature before getting myself too deep and finding out that no one has really studied the topic. For this paper I chose eating disorder relapse prevention. A couple reasons preventing relapse narrows my target population, it has more defined behaviors (as opposed to primary prevention of eating disorders), and I'm interested in it.

Then comes the research....

Google

It's so easy to bash big companies like google and claim they're ruining our privacy, and maybe they are. But I'll be completely honest: I love Google. And this is not an exaggeration. Sometimes it's a little disconcerting, but it's so darn convenient. One username, one password.
A quick breakdown of the Google services I use:

• Google (the search engine): the most obvious service, but so useful. It creeps me out when it remembers my past searches and become ever more talented at predicting my next search, but it's still amazing. 
• Google Scholar: great for research. And the best part is I can access essentially all the full-text results for free because of my affiliation with the university. 
• Google Chrome: It's fast and a beautifully minimal browser. When I open a new tab it pops up icons of my most frequented web pages that I can simply click on. It also syncs my chrome browsers, setting, and bookmarks across my computers (desktop and laptop) so they're both exactly how I want them without much work. My biggest problem is that I like to keep a lot of tabs open (at least 10 at a time) and chrome slows down when I get to about 12 or more. It does remind me to keep my tab appetite in check though. And I am still puzzling about why Google Bookmarks doesn't automatically sync with the bookmarks in chrome, hence the reason I don't use google bookmarks...it would be a lot of work. 
• Gmail: Amazing simple and brilliant.
• Google Translate: ok, rarely do I actually need to translate webpages, but it's still a lot of fun to play with. (and I waste way more time than I should on it)
• Google Trends: Another amazing time sink. Although I have found a couple legitimate uses when researching blog posts and being able to see the rise in searches about obesity, for example.
• Google Reader: An outstanding RSS reader. It consolidates all my blogs, lets me star and tag them, email them and more. (You could even add this blog's RSS feed! *wink*wink*nudge*nudge*)
• Google Calendar: Another simple, elegant service. I can have multiple color-coded calendars (e.g. work, school, personal). I can set up email, text, or pop-up alerts for 5 minutes before to weeks ahead of time (great for reminding myself to start work on a paper). 
• Google Voice: I don't know about anyone else, but I hate listening to voicemails. Google voice lets me avoid that. When I don't answer my phone it forwards to my google voice account which then transcribes the voicemail and sends it to my email. The transcribing is a little buggy, but it's usually decipherable, and it's improving, and the actual audio is still available to listen to. 
• Blogger: Ok, so this is one google service I don't particularly like. I use it for this blog out of necessity, but my personal blog is on Wordpress (a far superior platform). And it really irritates me that every time I put pictures in my posts blogger refuses to format them correctly. I have to view and preview the pages multiple times and make a hundred tiny edits to just make things line up correctly. 
• Google Maps: this always gives me better directions than mapquest, it might be because I grew up in a rural area and mapquest is terrible in rural areas. I also love that it now provides walking and biking directions with consideration to bike lanes and wide sidewalks (public health, eh? eh?)
• And then there's Google Earth, YouTube, Google Body, Google Books, Google Docs, Picasa (I find the face recognition in Picasa to be endlessly fascinating). 

But the one that trumps them all is Android. I can't live without my android phone (and the little green guy is kinda cute). Everything is interconnected: I can post articles from the NYTimes app directly to my facebook, I can open up twitter links in my browser and save them to my ReadItLater account. And since I use such a large number of Google services, they are automatically set to work with my phone...brilliant!

Seeing all these written out makes me realize just how much I depend on Google. It would be a very rough day for me if Google disappeared. Maybe I'll consider changing some...on second thought, that would be an awful lot of work. I'll continue as a diehard Google groupie for a while longer. 

Grammar and Writing

My younger brother calls me a grammar snob. I'm not. Really. I mean, I listen the the GrammarGirl podcasts, and I own Grammar Girl's books, as well as a couple of Diana Hacker's books, and I have a slew of grammar bookmarks in my browser. But I equate being a grammar snob with having perfect grammar/writing. At this I surely fail. Yes, mistakes bother me. Yes, I point out other people's mistakes. But I know that I have plenty of my own mistakes. Despite my attempts to edit I would venture a pretty large bet that several slip through. And there are probably grammar errors that I make that I don't even know I'm making (ignorance is bliss?). In most of my writing (formal and informal) I try to write things as concisely as possible. I also fail at this quite often.

I can be pretty hard on myself about grammar, which is why blogging can sometimes be such a relief. It gives me a legitimate outlet for a more informal writing style. I can pull out my favorite [often questionable] writing vices.

• I like to ask questions and then answer them (check out a couple paragraphs down). I'm sure there are times that I overuse that technique (probably every blog post). 

• I like to use ellipses (...) although I do my best to restrain myself since there are very, very few uses in formal writing and it is oh so easy to overuse them and drive people nuts. Extreme use of the ellipses bothers me too.

• And my use of sentence fragments? (see that one there!) I like to tell myself it is "stylistic" and not just plain wrong. Mostly I use them for my question asking, but I occasionally use them for emphasis (such as right after the first sentence in this post. 

• I also have a love affair with parenthetical remarks. This is because my brain thinks like that. Severe caffeine use makes it worse. Sometimes to the point where what I write is almost impossible to follow. The majority of my editing involves removing my tangential thoughts, or at the very least making them less obtrusive. I attempt to spare you all the torture of my mind. I live with it 24 hours a day...you shouldn't have to. 
• 
  
• Not as easy to spot, but I can get rather verbose at times. I forget that writing "I think" or "every single" or "so amazing" is redundant. The remainder of my editing revolves around removing those.

I'm positive there are many many more. But the beauty of blogging is that I can use them. I can evaluate where they work and how many is too many. I can edit. And none of it is graded!

That's great! So what do you...do?

Anyone currently in public health knows where this comes from.
It starts with an innocuous "So what are you doing these days?"
And the answer, "I'm in grad school in public health." (note: Avoid simply saying "I'm getting my MPH" It generally causes more trouble than it's worth)

Then comes the awkward moment where they start to sound happy for you but then they just wonder what on earth public health is.

And the next awkward moment where you know that they don't want a long answer, but it's nearly impossible to explain in just a single sentence. (Unless, of course, you use a run-on sentence).

Because, really, does anyone actually know what public health is? Maybe on some level people in the field have a sense of how broad it is, but I think it would take a lifetime to know everything it possibly encompasses. (Seriously, at least once a week I ask myself "What is public health?" I still don't have a good, succinct answer.)

To begin with, there are the 5 main areas: community and behavioral health, epidemiology, environmental health, health policy, and biostatistics Though many schools use various titles, they all have the same basic ones. But even that doesn't tell most of the story. So much in public health is collaboration between the departments and collaboration with other professions.

Sometimes I consider giving a quick example of public health that people might easily relate to, but there are so many! It's completely overwhelming.

A sampling:
community clinics, food safety, community planning, policies for insurance companies, vaccination programs, sanitation, health education, disease prevention, infectious disease, farm safety, workplace injuries, promoting seat belts and responsible drinking and exercise condoms nutrition birth control sunscreen sleep habits medication adherence, studying trends in diseases injuries food poisoning risks and social trends, emergency response, professional licensing, air quality, food quality, water quality, household safety (radon, lead, etc), number crunching (determining the deaths from gunshots or diabetes), prenatal care, childhood care, environmental testing. And not just in the US, but all of this happens globally, too!

I could sound pretentious and cite a dictionary definition: "Public health is the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals"

I could be a jerk and tell them to look it up themselves (this is what I did to my little brother growing up when he asked the meaning of a word).

I usually give in to brevity and simply say "I'm in community and behavioral health, and I focus a lot of disease prevention, and health education, and interventions that impact communities."

Is it the actual definition of public health? No. Is it all those people really care about? Usually.