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July 30, 2009
Written Comps - In the Morning
And the day I've been dreading for months is almost here. In the morning I'll wake up, walk into campus, and take my written PhD comprehensive exam. I'm scheduled to start at 9am, and I have eight hours (plus a lunch break to take a walk and rest my hand) in which to finish questions from each of my five committee members (Sue, Dave, Joel, Marcelo & Derrick). I really have no idea what to expect. I've been reading/studying a bunch of stuff over the last two weeks, with varying degrees of success, focus and also frustration. Basically, I've been going crazy, and am very tired of feeling the need to cloister myself away from friends and fun, or even just normal life. I just hope and pray I've been studying the right things, and that I'll be able to recall the right things at the right times tomorrow. My advisor Sue told me today that she thinks all of the questions are doable, and that she thinks I'll have no problem finishing them in under 8 hours. The question is, how much do/should I believe her? I guess I'll find out tomorrow if her confidence in my abilities is well-deserved or not. Right now I think everyone else is more confident than me about how I'll do on this thing, but I guess that's normal, right? She also told me this afternoon that she had to retype her question, because she decided that her original question was too hard. I was sure to tell her thank you for that. :-)
In any case, once the written exam's done, then at least I'll have some solid parameters about what to study for next Friday's oral PhD comprehensive exam, because during the oral exam I'll need to re-answer questions from the written exam that I goofed up or flat-out didn't know. As challenging or nerve-wracking as that might be, I feel like that'll be easier to prepare for than this written exam. I can't wait for this to be over. I want my life back.
Posted by Jared at 10:05 PM | Comments (1)
July 16, 2009
2009 GMU Conference
[On location in Fairfax, Virginia]
Greetings from the deep, DEEP South of northern Virginia! I'm down here in Fairfax for the 13th Annual George Mason University Conference on Atmospheric Transport & Dispersion Modeling. This is my fourth year in a row coming down here for the GMU conference, and Penn State once again sent a large contingent down here (11 people!). With it being only a four-hour drive down here from State College, it's just a really cheap conference to send people to. PSU constitutes 80% of the posters at this year's conference (four) and has more presentations (ten) than any other organization or university. In session #3 on Tuesday, five of the six presentations were by Penn Staters (including me, sandwiched between Walter & Dave S.). And usually it's the hottest week of the year when we come down here to GMU. Highs threatening 100 degrees with dewpoints in the low 70s have not been uncommon. This year the weather's actually not been too bad, however. Tuesday it was 83, yesterday 88, and today it's supposed to hit 90. Compared to how bad it usually is down here, I'll take it.
Last week was rather stressful for me, getting my conference presentation put together (and doing a fair bit of extra work for it) and writing my prospectus. Several *long* days at Walker, let me tell ya... But hey, I got the conference talk made (27 slides for a 12-minute talk) and I also finished a complete draft of my prospectus by the end of Friday afternoon. As of this morning I have edits from Sue to implement before I send it to my PhD committee by Monday. And then once I've sent out my prospectus, it's going to be time to study-study-study for my written comprehensive exam, which will last for 8 hours on Fri 31 July. [Gulp.] It's getting to be crunch time.
Anyway, as for the conference this week, my talk, "Toward an NWP Ensemble Configuration for AT&D Applications," went really well! I'd practiced it just twice last week, both times being able to zip through my then-28 slides in 13 minutes. It was definitely a bit more information than I wanted to include, but there were some good reasons to have it in there, so it stayed. When I gave the talk on Tuesday, I took a deep breath mentally while I was talking during my first slide (if that makes sense), which calmed me down a bunch and allowed me to slow down to a somewhat more comfortable pace. I figured I could slow down a touch compared to my practices because I didn't think I had to worry about the session chair standing up and telling me I was out of time. Why? you ask. Because the session chair was the person who last week insisted on me adding a few slides of extra info at the end of my talk. So yes, I knew how to play the game. :-) I don't think I went longer than my allotted 15 minutes anyway, but it was probably more like 14 minutes instead of the 13 minutes I'd been taking in practice.
As for other highlights of the trip down here, on the way down a few of us stopped by Frederick, Maryland, to see Joel, my former co-advisor. (Joel left Penn State a year ago to take a position at Bechtel Corporation.) His wife Maureen and their toddler Eva joined us all for dinner at a really neat place in Middletown called The Main Cup. It used to be a creamery way back in the day, but they remodeled it and fixed it up, so now it looks really nice and has tons of character. Very charming. Very good food too! It was good to see Joel again, and see that he's really happy with his new job and everything. It was also good to touch base with him at least once briefly before I send him my prospectus and he then comes up for my oral comps.
My friend Betsy from Gustavus is now a librarian here at George Mason, so it was really easy to visit her. On Tuesday night I went out to dinner with Betsy and her fiancee Shawn (a very recent development, congrats to them!), and brought a bunch of the Penn State crew along (just like what happened two years ago). Then yesterday I had lunch with her too. It was fun to see Betsy down here at GMU yet again. She & Shawn invited me along to go see the new Harry Potter movie last night, but the timing wasn't quite going to work out, so I'll go see it when I'm back in State College.
As for some actual amusing conference items from the talks themselves... Well, there was an Australian who joked about emus being so smart that they probably ran toward the chlorine rail tanker accident in Macdona, Texas, in 2004, thus leading us to believe that the extent of the lethal chlorine leak wasn't as far from the accident site as it actually was. The same guy also had a funny line about wanting to get away from some "f-ing" theories/descriptions of the boundary layer that incorporate the Coriolis parameter (f). Both of those definitely got a good laugh. I like that guy! And then yesterday one of the speakers said "uhh" or "umm" a total of 229 times in his 12-minute talk(!!). And that's not even counting some in the first minute before McKenzie started keeping track. It was rather astounding. He averaged one "uhh" every 4 seconds! I'm not sure I could, uhh, do that if I, uhh, tried. Wow. [UPDATE at 1:55pm: I forgot to mention that late in Walter's presentation on Tuesday, his Blackberry started talking to him while he was on stage: "Please say a command." Repeatedly. Pretty funny! And a presenter this afternoon, after a phone was ringing for awhile, said, "oh, that's probably my phone." Also classic. :-) ]
Well, now that I have my prospectus edits I should get started on those (while paying more attention to the talks if they seem interesting or relevant to my work, of course). And just to be clear, the vast majority of this post was written last night, and not during the conference talks. :-) Just two more sessions to go, one before lunch and one after lunch. There are three Penn Staters giving their talks in the very last session this afternoon (Kerrie, Andrew & Luna), so we won't be heading out until at least 3pm. I'm looking forward to sleeping in my own bed again, and actually not eating out for every meal. Not looking forward to all the studying I have to do, though.
Posted by Jared at 10:16 AM | Comments (1)
July 06, 2009
2009 Central PA 4th Fest
[NOTE: My YouTube videos are now embedded in this post, check them out!]
I hope all of you had a fantastic Independence Day weekend! Mine was a good one for sure. Carl came down on Friday night and after team trivia (1st place!), he, Jeff [Frame] (who also came down for the weekend), my new roommate Anders & I went down to the 797 Lounge to catch the Twins-Tigers game. We mainly went there so that Jeff could see first-hand what had become of the former Sports Cafe. We were all annoyed with the exceedingly loud hip-hop (and a deejay with his stupid scratching machine, even though very few people were there and nobody was dancing). They can't seem to decide if they want to be a dance club or a sports bar. Those two don't mix all that well though.
But anyway, onto the 4th. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, partly cloudy, temps in the low 70s and a pleasant breeze. Mid-afternoon Carl & I went up to the 4th Fest to check out what was happening up there, like the graphical waterfall and Jacob's band Cootie Brown playing on the White Stage. [NOTE: I'll embed a couple YouTube videos of those here tomorrow, once YouTube is done with their maintenance.] After that we went to Scott & Yvette's for the meteorology 4th of July cookout.
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Then Carl & I went up to the VIP viewing area with Jon & Steph (who was also back in town for a visit!). Before the fireworks we were treated to an absolutely magnificent sunset:
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(from "Pirates of the Carribean")
Once again, it was quite a show! I think last year's was slightly better overall, but that's not saying anything bad about this year's show. And I think I'm definitely hooked on sitting in the VIP viewing section, having been there the last two years. Without a doubt I'll be back there again next year, whether I buy a ticket for get comped a ticket somehow. I know I'm getting totally spoiled with the State College fireworks, but I may as well enjoy them while I can!
Oh, and my blog posting will probably start to get much less frequent for the next month or so. This week I'm putting together a powerpoint for a presentation that I have next week at the 13th Annual George Mason University Conference on Atmospheric Transport & Dispersion (it just wouldn't be a July without yet another GMU conference), and I need to make a ton of progress on writing my prospectus (my research proposal), which I need to give to my committee shortly after getting back from the GMU conference. Then it's study-study-study to get ready for my written comprehensive exam on Fri 31 July, followed by my oral comps at 1:30pm on Fri 7 August. Aaaaaagggghhhh!!!! I'm stressed out about it, understandably. So until then I'll probably largely be AWOL from bloggish activity, save for a random post or two. I absolutely cannot wait until my comps are finally done...
Posted by Jared at 11:46 PM | Comments (0)
July 03, 2009
SCEFC Set List (5 July 2009)
For quite some time on his blog, my friend Ben has put up a post whenever he's been leading the music team at State College Evangelical Free Church (SCEFC), listing each song and a little bit of his rationale for choosing them. I've been meaning to start emulating him for awhile, but am only now finally getting around to actually doing it.
I wasn't the originally scheduled worship team coordinator this week, but was a bit of an emergency fill-in. Mike was originally in charge this week, but was unable to find any pianists or guitarists who were available. It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that there weren't any instrumentalists available, because Mike does play bass and Mark Kay plays flute. But I don't think a bass-flute combo would be the most effective instrumentation to lead music at church. It'd be odd, at any rate. So when I realized that if I didn't play this week they'd be doing it a capella (or with just flute or flute & bass), I decided to step up. As a result, on Wednesday night Mike put me in charge of picking out the songs this week, so that I could choose songs that I thought I could carry with the piano. But he also requested a bit of a "patriotic feel," with this being July 4th weekend and all.
That really got me thinking, because I've long been uncomfortable with rah-rah-wave-the-flag stuff in church; I think church is entirely the wrong place for that. I looked through my hymnbook's "National Life" section, and several of the songs that were included there I simply did not feel comfortable playing in church, for theological reasons (including America the Beautiful and The Star-Spangled Banner). Basically, I cringe anytime I hear a fellow Christian (or anyone, for that matter, but non-Christians don't normally claim these things) claim that the United States was/is a Christian nation, or has some favored status in God's eyes, or that we're the new Israel or anything like that. It's just bad theology to have that interpretation of Scripture, and there's really nothing to support it (and yes, I know I'm not going into any depth on this issue, but that's for another post perhaps). As for the notion of the USA being or having been a "Christian nation"... contrary to popular belief in evangelical circles, the vast majority of the Founding Fathers were not Christians, but Deists and Masons. I read somewhere (I forget exactly where) that only two signers of the Declaration of Independence were actually Christians. We may have been a Christianized nation, but we were never a Christian nation; our government has never been a theocracy. Also, history has borne out repeatedly that the church is at its healthiest when it's not in bed with the government. While I think it's fine for Christians to be involved in government, and for certain generic issues to be highlighted now and again in church (the right to life, ending human trafficking, etc), I think it's easy for the church and for Christians to get distracted by political involvement. It's easy to pin our hopes and dreams onto particular politicians or party platforms, and to forget that our hope is to be in the Lord Jesus Christ only, in Him and Him alone. So, in sum, it's for a lot of those sorts of reasons that I'm uncomfortable playing many "patriotic" songs in church. I did decide to do a couple though, partly at Mike's request. Anyway, those were some of my thoughts running through my head as I went about choosing the set list last night.
Prelude: God Bless America - by Irving Berlin
Mike specifically requested this song. I plan on doing only one verse of this song, and singing it a capella to open the service. There's absolutely nothing wrong with praying for God's guidance for our nation.
Song #1: My Country 'tis of Thee - by Samuel F. Smith
This song starts singing about our country and our freedom (the sermon title is "Living in Freedom," on Galatians 5:12-26), but ends with singing praises about God. This is really the direction that I want to take the rest of the set.
Song #2: It Is God Who Holds the Nations - by Fred Pratt Green
This is another hymn, set to the tune of "Battle Hymn." Rather than speaking directly of America, this song is about how "It is God Who holds the nations in the hollow of His hand." God is in control, and whether things are going well or not in our nation, we should always honor Him.
Song #3: Sing Praise to the Father - by Margaret Clarkson and William H. Doane
Yet another hymn, this one to the tune of "To God Be the Glory." God, being in control of all the nations, should be praised. Margaret Clarkson is also one of my favorite hymn-writers.
Song #4: Shine, Jesus, Shine - by Graham Kendrick
A call/prayer for God to fill all nations of the world with His grace, mercy and glory. The first true non-hymn of the set. I thought of following this up with Spirit of God! Descend, since the sermon will be about living in the Spirit, but adding that hymn would've made the set too long.
Communion Song #1: Lead Us To Calvary - by Jennie E. Hussey and William J. Kirkpatrick
I'll be playing this song quietly while the bread is being passed out, purely as an instrumental piece (no singing).
Communion Song #2: Hallelujah! What a Savior! - by Philip P. Bliss
I'll be playing this song while the cup is being passed out, and will have the lyrics on the screen so that the congregation can sing it if they wish. I actually teared up a bit while practicing this song last night.
Closing Song: From the Inside Out - by Joel Houston
One of my all-time favorite songs (as I've blogged about previously), I think this will be a very good song to go out on, considering that the sermon text in Galatians is about living a transformed life in the Spirit. In order for that to happen, the Holy Spirit truly must consume us from the inside out.
That's the set list for this week. Mike & I are doing a quick run-through tonight (20 minutes from now, actually), in lieu of a rehearsal tomorrow. Nobody wants to do a rehearsal on Independence Day after all, not when there are grilled meats to eat and explosives to blow up. :-) Hopefully it'll go smoothly enough tonight that we won't need a rehearsal before the service on Sunday morning too.
For one of my next posts I hope to have some good photos and/or movies of this year's Central PA 4th Fest fireworks display, which is tomorrow night here in State College. Carl is on his way down from Ithaca for the weekend, because he wants to check out the 3rd-best fireworks show in the nation. Today I bought VIP viewing passes for both of us too, so we'll have a good spot for picture-taking and movie-making. :-)
Happy Independence Day, everyone!
Posted by Jared at 05:43 PM | Comments (1)