One Week In

But first, a rewind to orientation:

My official foray into school was the general orientation within the school of life sciences. On a fundamental level, the orientation was very good: big fat packets with all kinds of information / resources, great organization, tours of the buildings, and speakers galore. The obvious problem: 90% of that which applies to the school of life sciences students at large does not entirely apply to the minority of us involved strictly in the philosophy / history / sociology etc. of the life sciences. So we ended up sitting there for two hours trying to sift the relevant information (this is who you contact if you lock yourself out of your office) from the irrelevant (this is who you contact if you need anti-venom). This on top of the fact that "being oriented" is something that I contest the validity of - the resources are nice (great, actually, our admins are on top of their stuff), but the bulk of the information is going to be forgotten and or more appropriately picked up on the fly. So while it was nice to spend 10 minutes chatting with all of the new students, all of whom wearing a fairly perplexed look, the two hours of being talked at... yeah.

But the value of that two hours towered over the value of the next hour and a half, which consisted of chemical safety training. What a friggin' farce. This is the textbook "liability aversion" mentality that drives us. The points were obvious (don't mislabel your chemicals! Don't block access to the eyewash!) , the lecturer's attempts at humor lame, and the whole thing was just stupid - we were subjected to a class quiz at the end, but it consisted of questions like, "What was the name of the document that...". Blar. Hrrrmph.

I then had a few hours to kill on campus with errands and errata - getting a shiny student ID (which cost $25 for completely unspoken reasons), keys for the office, setting up loan deferment and such. At 3 there was a campus wide "Welcome Grad Students" party, only my prevailing thought was "This ain't no party I ever heard of." They had ice cream - sandwiches - and water. Oh, and popcorn. WOOHOO. I mean, a grad student party without beer, on campus or no, is incomprehensible, but even a diet coke would have been nice. A raffle was the only form of entertainment besides the acoustic stylings of a proto-typical sensitive guy with guitar and Lia-Loeb-glasses girl vocalist. They interspersed their own brand of laid-back adult contemporary music and unique bittersweet folk rock with complaints of the heat. The surrounding booths offered plenty of free schwag - I felt like I was at a late nineties techie recruiting fair at Rice (where's the "Entry Level register Engineer table again?), only everything was chincy and there were many more booths aimed at on-campus cultural groups. Verdict: LAME.

Then I met with my advisors to discuss my schedule for the semester - if I haven't mentioned it already, I'm taking Science, Technology and Law, the core Biology and Society Seminar, and the core Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology seminar. Lots and lots of reading, unsurprisingly. Pretty good thus far, though I am a little frustrated by the treatment of science within the context of the law class - it is a straight-up Law class, so it'll be interesting to talk to Mike NTPB along the way. Anyhoo, the meeting went well, my class schedule was all set... now what remains is figuring out how to schedule the remainder of my unscheduled time.

Friday, I had to go back for Fire & Safety training, another exercise in school sanctioned liability prevention. It turns out that ASU actually did have a big fire in their memorial union last year, a fact referenced no fewer than fifty times in the meeting. Obviously it's not that fire isn't a problem, it's that an hour-long lecture of pointing out the obvious doesn't really accomplish what it purports to. With the possible exception of temporarily rendering you hyper-aware of blocked exits.

Friday at 1, we had the official orientation just for the B & S program, and as I may have mentioned, I walked into a roomful of professors as the only grad student who was on time. And silence ensued. Really, it was just an awkward space to begin with - we had twenty people jammed into a lab space that could comfortable seat four, so no one could get over to the table for cookies and sodas. It really was a little anthropological exercise: lacking cocktails in hand, cocktail party conversation proved impossible. Eventually all of the other students showed up, and for the first of what turned into six times over the past week, we all introduced ourselves and what we were interested in studying. This, it turns out, is a prime format for dropping vocab on the crowd, as it turns out "I'm interested in how reliable brain scans are and how we use them" can quite readily turn into "My work regards the epsitemological status of brain imagery with regards to the taxonomy and etiology of constructs of psychological disease." I'm picking on one particular person here, a new student named Melissa, and I'm doing it in jest; she certainly wasn't the only one - as you can imagine, some of the profs were even worse - and she herself has pointed out the absurdity of such introductions. It gets extra funny when you hear the same people giving the same riff in repeated situations over the course of the week - we had a barbecue on Sunday, a seminar on Monday, another seminar on Friday, and a biology school brown bag lunch on Friday all of which featured M delivering versions of the sentence. Anyways, here's a sample construction of the sentence I've been delivering of late, necessarily doomed to change over the next year or so:

"I'm interested in the structure of concepts involving complex knowledge, the distortion involved in necessarily simplifying complex concepts in order for other experts and/or lay people to communicate those concepts, and the resultant social narratives involving said concepts, both in how the science affects the popular concept and how the popular concept in turn affects the science."

And I didn't even have to drop "epistemological" in there! More specifically, incidentally, I'm hoping to look at the phenomenon of popular science literature. This is all down the road from here.

So that meeting was good if a little miscellaneous - it was clear that the professors had other work to do than to sit and hang out with new grad students, so the room cleared pretty quickly. I met some of the other students in my program, all of whom seem nice and eager to cooperatively explore our areas of interest. I'm interested to see if that trend persists.

On Sunday we had a barbeque with all of the various departments connected to ours; the categorization is uninteresting, but just trust that there are lots of different departments taking subtly different approaches to the problems we all discuss. I dreaded the barbecue a bit - just not wanting to partake of the usual chat about the weather dynamic. The Beck graciously came with me, and thankfully Jason (my advisor) showed up with his wife Wanda, so we could sit and chat with people we knew rather than exchanging miscellaneous pleasantries. I had Ultimate that afternoon - trying to get back in shape for the upcoming fall season - so we ducked out a bit early, but despite y apprehensions, we had a pretty good time, and Beck got to meet a few people. (I also found out that an Ultimate friend of mine - Genevieve - works in the consortium for science policy and outcomes (aka CSPO - oh lord, the acronyms) , so it was fun to find a kindred frisbee soul in the program.

From there it's been on into the first week - classes are good, people are good, office set up is good. If I had a list of complaints, it would be:

1, ASU is a total flesh factory. It's ridiculous, distracting, and a microcosm of the absurdity of the American education system at large. My victorian sensibilities are, like, so aflush. No - that is not the real point. I am all for free expression, the let your freak flag fly lifestyle. The real point is that it's a flesh *factory*, a thoroughly uninteretsing aesthetic derived from, I don't know, Glamour magazine. My kingdom for a sexy goth princess! Not really. But the whole thing just gives a vibe of bright sunny sadness. Oh Yoshimi, please don't let those robots defeat me.

2, More to the point, a large portion of the undergraduate population here is decidedly un-academic. This is a topic for a separate post, but the effects of this are prominent.

3, My personal program is WIDE open. This is not so much a complaint as noticing the two-edged swordedness of it - awesome that I am free to pursue, terrifying that no one is telling me what / how to do it. That second part is not entirely true - I would have to give my advisior an A+ so far - but I do feel a little lost at sea some of the time.

4, Lonely! My labmate and advisor are often not in the office, leaving me in a room with nothing but readings to comfort me. I made an effort to combat this Friday and went more out of my way to stop by people's labs to say hey. It seems that the propensity to hole oneself up is inherent, though, so I'll have to consciously avoid that.

5, Almost forgot - big university = impersonal university = bureaucratic nonsense. On Monday, we figured out that I needed a certain account access so I could check my advisor's schedule - and after multiple steps, phone calls, chat sessions, etc., the issue is still not resolved. I completely understand that the IT department has a billion people demanding their time, but I suspect this particular problem would take five minutes to walk through if someone would just sit down and do it with me. And it's not going to be a kinda "hey dumbass, plug in your computer" answer I need, it's just that I don't have authority to add myself to certain servers on campus. Tres frustrating, though I suppose it's a factor I'll have to get to used to.

Otherwise, all systems are go. I finished a book, Leviathan & the Air Pump, kinda a seminal History of Science text, in a day. Lots more to read before this coming Friday, too. In the words of Mitch Hedberg, I've got to learn to read faster. But, in sum, things = good, better in this whole "career" respect than they've been in quite some time. Hollah.

More later - got a hot date with Beck and a movie about a robot in a little bit. Happy Lack of Labor Day to US!!!