More Sloth Love

It's that time again! That's right, when I revisit my obsession with sloths and blog about it. Sloths really are amazing creatures that are extremely adorable and intelligent. How can anyone look at this picture (taken by Milo Burcham) and not instantly fall in love with the animal?

What is this sloth is pondering? Probably, how adorable he is. :)

The high-hanging and slow-paced lifestyles of sloths are pretty fascinating, and sloths are fairly friendly with humans. Here is an interesting BBC Earth clip on sloths.

Now, if you've developed a sloth obsession (which is completely understandable), the next logical step is to show off your affection for sloths through... consumerism! The market for sloth products is not huge, but here are some cute sloth shirts, accessories, and plushies that I recommend.

These cartoon-ish sloth shirts from Squidfire are simple and cute and come in both men and women's sizes. Squidfire also has some other cute shirts, but the sloths are definitely my favorite.

If you're into handmade crafts and accessories, these fabric sloth cuffs are adorable and a really unique idea. These ones are made by mairuru and sold through her Etsy shop. Cute idea and looks like they are well made.

No sloth lover is complete without at least one plush sloth. Luckily, there is a pretty good variety of very cute sloth plushies out there for all your sloth cuddling needs. As you can see, plush sloths are great at showing their affection for sloth-enthusiasts and also make great hats!

And the Winner is...

Since last Fall I have been stressing about graduate applications, frantically making sure that all the parts of the application are in, worrying myself to death waiting to hear back from schools, rejoicing at acceptances, claiming "I didn't want to go there anyway" at rejections, and finally making the big decision on the next 4-5 years of my life. Being the nerd I am, I made a table of my results for your viewing pleasure.

School	Result	Funding
MIT	Rejected :(
UC Berkeley	Rejected :(
NSF GRFP	Rejected :(
UC Irvine	Accepted	None
Georgia Tech	Accepted	None
Virginia Tech	Accepted	None
CU Boulder	Accepted	Yes!
UI Urbana-Champaign	Accepted	Yes!

University of Colorado Boulder and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were the only two schools to offer me funding and invite me to visit their campus, so the decision came down between those two. Both are great schools with excellent programs in ECE and power electronics. I liked both their campuses, professors, and graduate students. This really only made the decision MUCH more difficult. After several frantic tweets, many phone conversations, and various emails, I decided to take the offer at UIUC. Starting this Fall, I'll be a research assistant doing research somewhere in the realm of power electronics and working towards my MS and then PhD! I am very excited about next year and I hope it will be an excellent experience.

Part of me is amazed that I am doing what I set out to do just about a year ago. I somehow managed to come out of a bad job situation, get myself back on my feet and get back on the road to graduate school (with lots of help from my friends and family, of course). I know I still have a long way to go, but at least I am headed in the right direction. I have already started to settle into my life in Boston surrounded by great friends and living a happy (mostly healthy) lifestyle. I am sad to be leaving a place after just a year, yet again, but life is an adventure, right? And I'm really hoping I will stick to the whole graduate school thing for more than a year. Let's hope for the best. ;) 

Grad School Apps: Check!

I haven't posted in a while, which generally means life is good. My biggest accomplishment over the last couple months is that I've completed ALL my grad school applications! I applied to the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and 7 graduate schools in Electrical Engineering going for MS/PhD, hoping to focus on power electronics/power systems. Here is my list of schools in east-to-west order:

MIT

Virginia Tech

Georgia Tech

UI Urbana-Champaign

CU Colorado

UC Irvine

UC Berkeley

I am excited/scared-to-death to hear back from schools, but I probably will not hear anything for at least another month. In the meantime, I plan to work on a personal website, work on a new side website for Auntie's Aprons, read more sci-fi books, and play more Xbox games (currently playing Mirror's Edge and Braid). In short, nerding it up! Woo!

Life in Boston Update

It's been a while since I posted, which means that things, in general, are going very well. I've moved up to Boston, and am working for Bluefin Robotics as an Electrical Engineer. I'm learning a very different set of skills in this position that focus more on system level engineering. I definitely like working in a smaller company and the fact that I am working on underwater robots is pretty exciting. I am still very set on studying power electronics and/or alternate energy sources, and am currently working on applications for graduate school.

Here are some highlights from the last couple months:

• When to a few lectures and final presentations for the International Development Design Summit (IDDS) at MIT (put on by MIT and Olin College). There were some really interesting design problems and creative solutions that really got me excited about research, especially in alternate energy sources.
• I'm taking unofficial Korean classes at MIT taught by Korean students at MIT. It's great to have a structured class again to learn about grammar and sentence structure. We also get to watch movies/dramas in class. ^^
  
• Ran the 5k for Race for the Cure in Boston as part of the Olin College team. My time was 27:47, which was not amazing, but not bad for not being completely in shape. Really, it was just great to see Olin people and other Alumni. :)
• My brother got married at the beginning of September and I was a bridesmaid! They currently live in San Jose, but had the wedding in Marquette, MI (where they met and large portions of both families live). It was a really fun wedding and it was great to see my extended family on both sides. My brother and his wife are a great pair (they are both gamers) and I know things will work out well for them. Here are some pictures from the wedding.

The Wedding Ceremony.

The Bridesmaids.
I'm on the left, then the bride's sister and bride's cousin/best friend.

Cutting the (Totally Awesome) Wedding Cake.

• This past Friday, I had a minorly unproductive day (I work long hours anyway). One of my coworkers got these Inanimate Character Stickers, and we decided to put them on things at our desks. Here are the fruits of our labors.
  

To sum it all up, life is pretty damn good! But how can it not be with cute anthropomorphized office objects looking at you all day? :D

Boston or Bust

Mission: "Get the Hell Out of Texas"
Objective: Move from Dallas, TX to Boston, MA
Distance: 1,834 miles
Driving Time: 29 hours
Travel Dates: Monday to Wednesday
Trip Route:



Monday
My aging Nissan Altima '94 had died just 2 weeks before my planned date of departure and since I wouldn't need a car in Boston I decided to donate it to NPR and get a rental car for the trip. I picked up my Chevy Impala from National Car Rental (cheapest rates for a one way, but got me in the end with extra fees, Grr). Packed up all the crap, which fit very comfortably into the rather large car and set out just after noon accompanied by my beta fish, my worm bin, and an audio book of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. On the first day I made it out of Texas, through Arkansas, and into Tennessee. Everything was flat and pretty boring, actually.

Tuesday
Tennessee is too long. Even the name is too long. Long and boring. I was very happy when I made it into Virginia, which was very beautiful. I decided to embark on a side mission and visit Virginia Tech (VT). I am planning on applying to VT for MS/PhD in EE this fall and I'm specfically looking at the Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES). I snooped around the building where the lab was located and happened upon a graduate student who worked in the lab and gave me a very quick tour. I was pretty impressed by the size and resources. I also thought the VT campus was beautiful. Definitely a place I would like to go for grad school. After the quick visit I continued for a few more hours and stayed the night in Staunton, Virginia, where I slept very well; driving all day is oddly exhausting.

Wednesday
My last day on the road turned out to be the most frustrating. It was supposed to be 10 hours of driving, which is really no problem for me. The way I do road trips is with as few stops as possible. I usually try to go at least 3 hours before stopping sometimes 5 or 6 hours. I just want to get there and be done with it.

As I was nearing New York city I decided to take an alternate northern route to avoid lunch-time traffic. Unfortunately, I ended up in complete dead lock on the highway in the middle of nowhere. (Maybe due to an accident in a construction zone. I never found out.) Eventually, I had to take another side road through a bunch of tiny towns before I could get back onto the main highway. This little detour added an extra hour to my trip, which made me very annoyed, but I powered through it. :P

After 12 hours of being on the road and two very short stops, I made it into the Boston area. The insane driving tactics of Massachusetts residents becomes very clear once you reach the Mass Pike, but luckily I remembered how to drive like a Mass hole. At 8 pm on Wednesday, exactly 12 hours after I started driving that morning, I reached Jon and Drew's apartment where I was greeted by not only the wonderful Drew and Jon, but a delicious dinner as well. Feels good to be back!

Thoughts on 26 Truths

I just finished reading It's A Wonderful Lie: 26 Truths About Life in Your Twenties that was recommended to me by Janet. It's a collection of essays about the experiences and lessons learned from various female writers about their twenties. Definitely aimed at women, but it gives some interesting perspectives on the weird transition that happens in your twenties from school to starting/finding your career path.

Reading these essays made me feel very glad that I don't have a spending problem, I'm not planning to be married by age 25, I'm not addicted to anything (besides a good internet connection), and engineering vs. writing provides a much more stable income. It also made me realize that it's fine, even normal, that my first job was kind of crappy, my love life is often confusing and messed up, and there is no replacement for good friends.

One thing that really surprised me reading this book is the number of women that had a set time frame that they had to be married and start having kids (often based on their parents example). I am a little odd in this respect, but since I was pretty young I have decided that marriage and kids are not a goal of mine (and I was morally opposed to the idea of me getting married through most of high school, but that's another story). For the most part, I enjoy dating (I actually think I need to date a little more), but I don't see the goal as finding a mate. It is more to get to know someone on an intimate level.

I constantly hear people say "your maternal clock will kick in and all you'll want is kids" or "smart people need to have more children" (to avoid the Idiocracy scenario). When/if my maternal clock kicks in, fine, but it sure hasn't yet. Yes, intelligent people need to pass their genes along, but I'm not going to be pressured into having kids for that reason alone. I'll donate eggs if it comes to that!

It just seems like there is a huge trade-off between career goals and children that is imposed more on women than men. It is changing slowly and depends on the career, but when a working couple has kids it is more likely that the woman will stop work and take care of the kids. My mother did this and she is glad she did, but I refuse to do the same thing. I am just too career focused.

Maybe I just need to find a good house husband or someone who doesn't want to have kids. But really, why am I even worrying about this right now? I really just need to focus on working hard for this year and getting into a good PhD program for next year. Like I said, too career focused (I think it's genetic). :)

A Year in the Life, is Enough for Me

For the last 2 months, I have been on the job hunt and I think I am finally close to catching a good one. I'll be up in Boston Monday through Wednesday interviewing. But, if nothing works out, my plan is to move to the Bay Area and start looking there. Either way, my days in Dallas are numbered and though I will miss a lot of the people I have met here, I am very optimistic about the move. I was never meant to live in Dallas.

I have learned a lot about myself and the way I want to live. It is still very true that I am an idealist and overachiever. My lifestyle here never allowed me to achieve all that I wanted. Maybe it was the fact that I had to drive everywhere, often very long distances and it always felt like a waste of time, energy, and money. Maybe it was that when I was in a time of need, I felt like there was no one there to help me. Or, maybe it was that I had no direction, no ultimate goal besides: work, so you can make money, and... then what? Spend it on frivolous things because the message reinforced by living in Dallas is "you need more."

In a way, I failed. I failed to take on a new city and lifestyle, and make it my own. I didn't conquer and stand strong. I became angry, sad, scared, and ultimately broke down. Every time an interviewer asks me why I left my job at TI, I want to tell them "Because that job and this city broke me, and I wanted to get out before it destroyed me," but I of course give them the well-practiced politically correct answer. This really has been a difficult year for me, and I wonder if staying in Boston or moving to the Bay Area would have changed that for me. Though, it really doesn't seem to be worth much thought at this point.

All that matters now, is that I have a clearer picture of what I want and don't want in my life, and I plan to move forward with that. I want to live somewhere, where I have close friends who know me, where I don't have to drive absolutely everywhere, and where I can be myself without being labeled a crazy environmentalist, feminist, gay rights, mostly-vegetarian weirdo. Because I am normal, but I just don't have the energy to try to prove that to everyone anymore.