Me. I'm an experimental learner. My entire life and knowledge is based off of me trying different things (even when people tell me that I'm being a fool for testing things that have already been proven long ago or for not taking their first-hand advice) and learning from my mistakes and successes.
- LECTURE!
- Midterms
- Projects
- Homework
- Discussions
- Work
- Playtime
My mind keeps wandering back to Australia.
I have vague memories of it, but I never really thought about it before. My mom told me when I was young, I used to always want to write with my left hand, but every time I did, she'd whack me in the center of my palm with a bundle of chopsticks. Something about how it will help me in the future, and when she was young, the nuns that raised her said writing with the left-hand was bad or evil or something. (She also used to have curly hair and the nuns said that it was the sign of the devil, but she really loved the nuns and they loved her.)
This is the project I pulled an all nighter for. 12 midnight (I worked till midnight today) to 7 am. I just crashed and now I'm up at 2PM. Dx I'm so glad I don't have to work or go to class today. xD I do have a birthday party to attend though. Oh lawd, I already feel like a grad student.
I think I'm set on where I want to do Archaeology this Summer. I was initially planning to do Balkan Archaeology, but I saw this opportunity and I couldn't pass it up. It's with the University of Pittsburgh and its in Mongolia. Hehe, sounds awesome. It's only $1,400 bucks for the program fee too. Which includes transport, training, and meals. It will be shorter than the England Field School, but that's fine.
So basically, I figured it out. I'm in love with archaeology and that's what I want to spend my life (or at least this first half of my life doing). I reassessed why I wanted to be a doctor in the first place and it was simply because I wanted to help the people in front of me. Basically I'd imagine what it would feel like for someone in front of my to be hurt and injured and I couldn't do anything to save them at all. That's why I wanted to be a doctor.
Sometimes I just need to stop feeling sorry for myself and buck up dammit.
Great Minds May Think Alike...
But I bet they find it annoying when they do…
By:
Christopher Faber
28 October 2009
EVE 10
Two-thousand and nine marks a great year for recognition of
amazing advances made in the field of Natural History. Or at the very least, it
marks a great year for giving a lot of attention to this one guy in history:
Charles Darwin, (I’m sure you’ve heard of him somewhere; he was really big back
in the 1860’s; just had his 200th birthday, you know him). On the
eve of the 150th anniversary of his hard-hitting book on the
mechanisms explaining why certain animals look different from each other (i.e. like
one species of a Galapagos finch and another species of Galapagos finch; or
like one species of Galapagos finch and a zebra), I, being the party pooper
that I am, would like to bring attention to the stealer of his thunder: Alfred
Russel Wallace. Darwin was a confidant of Wallace, and Wallace spoke to Darwin
about many of his ideas. It was no surprise then that Wallace should send first
to Darwin his essay titled “On the
Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type;” a
work that had outlined the very principles of the concept Darwin had been
working on for years but refused to publish: Natural Selection. Of course,
faced with the possibility that someone else might get credit for his idea
first, Charlie-boy finally got past his bout of procrastination and raced to
publish his “Origin of Species”. As
we know it today, the live-by motto of academia is “Publish or Die”, a harsh rule
suggesting that if you don’t have the mental fitness to publish your findings
immediately, another individual with no such incapacity to write out a quick
abstract and follow up, will outcompete you for resources (public eye, academic
notoriety, etc.) claiming the find as their own, leaving you to wither away
into scholarly obscurity while they thrive and live on to produce more
successful offspring research with their newfound grant money and other
benefits. Ironically sounds a bit like natural selection, eh? So why did Darwin
not publish as soon as this bombshell of an idea popped into his head? Well
according to Sir Julian Huxley, (descendant of Thomas Henry Huxley, known to be
Darwin’s Bulldog, a loyal sort of companion that no good scientist should be
without
[– wait… What was that boy? Someone is attempting to do a satire on Darwin
before me? Well sic’im Huxley! That’s right, go for the throat! …Ahem-]), Darwin
had a “cautious, and almost diffident, temperament [which] held him back from
publishing his conclusions.”
Not much of an excuse if you ask me. But then he goes on to say that Darwin would not publish “until he could support [his conclusions] with adequate facts.” I guess this is a bit more excusable. Regardless, if Darwin didn’t have the connections that he did (specifically Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell, in addition to his bulldog), as well as holding a higher status in the scientific community than did Wallace, I suppose we would be celebrating Wallace (week?) Day instead of Darwin Day. Is having a great deal more data than your competitors to support your theory more important than getting the idea out there in the first place with your name on it? I honestly have no idea, as I’m merely an undergraduate student, and have yet to face the dog-eat-dog politics in the realm of scientific advances. All I know is that in order to independently come up with the idea of natural selection pretty much at the same time Darwin did, Wallace would have to be just as clever. And as an equally gifted person, in the midst of an entire year celebrating the affluence of Darwin’s revolutionary thoughts, Wallace doesn’t deserve to go overlooked or underestimated. So, cheers to two intelligent men who came up with the same idea at the same time and somehow managed to live through that frustration.
... intend to become a permanent citizen in Australia. =/
Basically at this point in my life, I'm at the crossroads. I made the decision before, but it never really hit, and I didn't know how much I'd really love the alternative.
However, my goal was also to live a story and set an example. I wanted to grow up helping others as my job. And that's why I wanted to pursue medicine, even though it's not something I have much interest in, nor have any great love for. I made the decision to do all that I could to go to med school. As a result, it's been a hard road, and I'm barely there. But now, the decision is setting in. And this course could soon prove permanent. If I go to grad school get a Master's in Public Health, there's no going back from there.
