The Grey Literature – Page 25 – The Grey Literature

A lot can happen in a year

I arrived here in Montreal one year ago on Friday.

A lot has changed.

Sometimes it’s good to sit back and take stock of all the things that have happened, and to think about all the things that one has to be thankful for. Things are generally pretty good now: I had a great job for the summer, I have great friends living in my building, and I was just talking with Pickles today and thinking about how much I appreciate her. I even have a TA-ship and an RA-ship lined up for this school year.

I’m TA-ing the introductory ethics course in the philosophy department this year, which will be exciting.

Things are different from the way they were a year ago. They’re different from what I expected, and certainly different from what I wanted, but I’m okay with the way things are.

OMSAS

When applying to medical schools in Ontario, you have to fill in an online application with OMSAS. This is nice, because it means that you don’t have to fill out a different form for each school, but there’s a few bugs that I have noticed.

One of the parts of the application is a sort of autobiographical sketch where you can brag about some of the things you’ve done that would make you an excellent candidate for medical school. For each of these things, however, you need to provide a “verifier.” A verifier is someone who can vouch for the fact that you actually did what you claim you did.

One thing that I’m pretty proud of, that I think would look good on the application, is the small business I started in my second year. Everything in the autobiographical sketch needs a verifier, but I can’t think of anyone who it would be appropriate to list there, so I put my very own self down as a verifier.

If they want more proof, I can scan and send them a copy of my old business licence, I suppose.

By the way, I’m not avoiding the question about why I decided to apply for medical school again. I’m just trying to write a response that’s good, or one that could at least serve as an outline for an answer to that question, which will be asked on a number of applications.

On Thursday, I quit my job

… Effective August 1, 2010.

A lot has changed over these past few months. My original plan, coming in to the summer was to work at my job for a year, and take a year off school, or if I could manage it, work at my job and finish my thesis at the same time. As the summer went on, I quickly discovered how unfeasible that plan really was.

First off, when I went to the philosophy department to see if I could find a supervisor, I discovered that there was a professor who would have been perfect for supervising me, but she took last year off for maternity, and this year she’s on sabbatical, and so I just happened to be doing my MA on the two years that she wouldn’t be here.

So a couple weeks ago, I spoke with a professor regarding my situation, asking if it would be possible to take a year off, since that would give me a chance to recover financially and to figure out what to do for my thesis.

I had a lengthy conversation with that was emotionally cathartic, rational and productive. The prof I spoke to was my Human Research Ethics prof from last semester, who was also the acting head of the Bioethics MA programme at the time. When I told him my plan, his response was basically:

“No! Don’t take a year off! You’ll never come back!”

So we talked about that for a while. And the big thing that was keeping me from continuing in September was the money. I had done some math before the phone call, to see what my situation was, and really, I wouldn’t need that much more to make it through the school year. A second TA-ship in my second semester would do it, but I can’t count on getting one of those, necessarily.

The prof called me back a few days later with an offer of some grant money for a research assistant-ship, and he suggested that I re-arrange my thesis so that it aligns with the RA-ship. I’m going to be researching the ethics of prediction in human research.

(The term “RA” is confusing. At McGill, it means “Research Assistant,” but at UWO, where I did my undergrad, it means “Residence Advisor.”)

This is great. Now, I have a supervisor, a thesis topic, and a bit more money.

I estimate that if I take all the money from my TA-ship, my new-found RA-ship, the money in my bank account, everything I will have set aside by September, and what I expect to receive from OSAP, I will have just enough to make it through the school year, as long as there are no nasty surprises.

But I suppose, even after all that, the question still remains, Why did I quit my job?

I’m going to take the MCAT this September. I’ve been preparing for this for the last few weeks (I’m almost done orgo!), and I want to take the month before the test off, so that I can focus on my studies. I’m able to do this because I got paid for some old freelance web design work that I’ve been doing off-and-on for the last few months.

My plan for the month of August will be to get up like I normally do, at 5h, go to the gym for 6h30, be done there by 8h30 and hit the library by 9h. Then I’ll spend the day there, either working on my research, or prepping for the MCAT. I’m going to study like it’s my job.

I’m glad of the design job that I had this summer, but I’m excited about the beginning of August, too. :)

How to get your full driver’s licence without taking your G test

Get your G1 and then your G2 licence in Ontario in the normal manner.
Move to Montréal for school.
Exchange your G2 for a Québec permis probatoire.
Wait for the permis probatoire to expire. Do not get in any car accidents during this time.
When the permis probatoire expires, they will give you a full licence.
Pay the fee (approx. $100) and smile for your photo.
You never have to take your G test.

Or such is my understanding of my situation, after a phone conversation with someone who works at the SAAQ this afternoon.

Ubuntu “Wastebasket” vs “Deleted Items folder”

At work, I’m very lucky that I don’t have to use Windows, except for testing sites on Internet Explorer. I use Ubuntu 10.04 LTS – the Lucid Lynx, and I’m very happy. I hear my co-workers swearing about glitches in Windows very frequently (although to be fair, it’s just as often that Dreamweaver is the source of frustration) and I just keep typing, protected by an invisible cloud of smug satisfaction. (My substitute for Dreamweaver is Kate, the text editor. I don’t like it quite as much as Smultron, my editor of choice on the Mac, but it works well enough.)

I love Ubuntu. I think it’s the most user-friendly GNU/Linux I’ve used, but there’s something that’s been bugging me for a while. It’s a little thing, and I think that’s why it bothers me so much. It wouldn’t take much to fix it.

See the attached screenshot. On the Macintosh, when you delete a file, it goes to the Trash. On Windows, when you delete a file, it goes to the Recycle Bin (or at least it does on the copy of Windows XP that I have running through VirtualBox). Where does a file go when you delete it in Ubuntu?

Does it go to the Wastebasket or does it go to the Deleted Items folder?

I know it’s nitpicky, but when I right-click on the Trash icon on the bottom right of my screen, in the contextual menu, it says “Open the Wastebasket,” and then immediately below that, it says “Empty the Deleted Items folder.”

Canonical! You were doing so well! What happened?

Earthquake

There was an earthquake this week in Montréal. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I did notice it.

The computers provided for my design team are new, but they have trouble sometime. They turn themselves off periodically, and sometimes their fans sound like an aircraft preparing to take off.

So when I saw my computer monitors shaking, my first thought was that it was another problem related to the fans inside my computer. In fact, to test my theory, I started pushing the leg of my desk slightly against the enclosure of my computer, to see if the shaking increased or decreased.

And here’s where it gets weird: For a second, I thought I had established a relationship between them. I nearly called over one of my co-workers to show them that whenever I pressed the leg of my desk against my computer, the whole thing shook enough to make my computer monitors shake.

Then the earthquake ended.

This is what is interesting about what I did: I think I unconsciously selected which observations I would pay attention to, and ignored the ones that didn’t support my theory.

So how do I know I’m not doing the same thing with my earthquake theory, now?

Figuring things out

So I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to be doing, come this September. I have a few options right now, and it feels like on the even-numbered days, I’ve made one decision, and on odd-numbered days, I’m of completely the opposite opinion.

To catch you up, last semester was really disappointing to me in a lot of ways. I was closer than I ever have been to dropping out of school. It got so bad, that in a counselling session with a therapist at McGill, I explored the question of how bad an academic programme would have to be before one would be justified in suing McGill for one’s tuition back.

After I stopped being so bitter about that, I ended up with a job, and a pretty decent one, too. It’s close to where I live, the money is good, and I get to be creative at work. I’m working as a designer at a marketing company. It’s an excellent job, and I’m glad for it. I’m still in a sort of probationary period that will last 3 months, where they’re still deciding whether they want to keep me, and I’m still deciding whether I want to stay there.

I’ve been enjoying living with the privileges of a regular paycheque. I don’t have to worry at the end of the month about whether or not I will have enough money to cover rent. This is a step up from the last semester. They ran out of TA-ships before they got to me, and so money was very tight, and I had a spreadsheet going that calculated, based on my previous expenses, how long I had until my money ran out.

So when I landed this job, my first thought was that I could finally relax a bit. And I have been! Things have been pretty decent of late. I’m enjoying things being stress-free, by comparison to this last year.

One of the options that I am considering is taking a year off school to de-stress, pay off some debt and enjoy not having to worry about money or school. There’s a few reasons I’m considering this:

I don’t think that I’ll get much by way of student loans for this year, and I have no reason to believe that I’ll get a second TA-ship this year either, which means I’ll be in a much worse financial situation than even last year, unless something unexpected and good happens.

To make it through the year, I’d only need a few thousand dollars more. You wouldn’t think that would be so hard to get, but it’s easier to get a full-time job than it is to get a job, even part-time, that is compatible with being a student.

I could probably make it through the year if I knew I was going to get a second TA-ship, or if there was an RA-ship (Research Assistantship) on the horizon somewhere, but things are looking grim.

I’m going to apply for OSAP anyway, even though I am sceptical that I will get anything from them. And I’m going to send out some emails to profs to see if there’s any RA-ships that I can do during the school year. I don’t need a lot of money. I just need enough to get through the second semester.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep my options open as best I can. If I think I can make it through the year financially, I will give notice that I’m quitting my job when the probationary period ends.

Does anyone know any profs at McGill who need research assistants who know philosophy and medical science? I can write, think critically, closely read dense papers, and I know my way around a pipette.

New gym

Because I have a new job that is in the opposite direction of the McGill campus, it didn’t make that much sense to get a summer membership at the McGill fitness centre. So, I joined a gym that is one Métro station away from where I work.

What’s kind of funny about this gym is that it’s almost always completely empty. It’s in a mall where nearly half the stores are empty. But then you go inside, and there’s a very well-equipped gym that just doesn’t have that many clients. It’s great – I don’t have to wait for any machines there at all.

While I was there this week past, I noticed a sign posted to the wall next to the water fountain, which was an advertisement for private personal trainers at the gym. Look at the last bullet. It’s like the person writing it got bored halfway through the last sentence and decided to print up a dozen copies and post them anyway.

Editing is important!

I tried to send this photo by text message to a bunch of my friends, but it was too small for them to read on their phones, typically. One of them texted me back, saying he guessed it said “Taser results … adequate.”

I think that would have made for an interesting personal training programme at a gym, actually. I bet taser results would be adequate indeed!

Done!

This last essay was particularly painful to write. It’s not that I found the material less interesting, or that there was anything about the essay itself that was bad—I’ve just had a huge headache for the past few days, and all I wanted to do today was sleep. I don’t think the quality of my writing suffered as a result, but it was just harder to get through it.

I’ve been drinking water and taking acetaminophen, but I think it’s just the stress catching up with me. I’m tired and I’ve had a hard time sleeping lately.

I was originally planning on writing about hyperintensionality, but I couldn’t find the right sort of sources for the essay I wanted to write, so I decided to write about Kit Fine, the guy that I did my in-class presentation about. He argued for modal pluralism, and I was reasonably convinced by him, and I was going to defend him from Chalmers and his zombie arguments. While writing this essay, though, my opinions changed. I started as a modal pluralist, and ended up a modal monist. Good work, David J. Chalmers.

I would like to note at this point that zombies in philosophy aren’t the same as zombies in the movies. For a philosopher of mind, a zombie is a person who is a complete physical duplicate of a normal human being, but who lacks internal phenomenal experience of her own consciousness. Ooooo … spooky. I sometimes wonder if the term was invented by a lazy philosophy prof who wanted to go to a Hallowe’en party but who didn’t want to bother dressing up:

“No seriously guys, I’m a zombie. I’m a complete microphysical duplicate of the non-zombie me, but I just don’t have any phenomenal experience. There is no ‘what it is like’ for me to be me.”

And, like other philosophers, he would be totally socially unaware of himself, and not notice his friends rolling his eyes at him.

One of the concepts that Kit Fine makes up for use in his paper is that of “schmass,” which is like mass, except that it works on an inverse cube law, rather than an inverse square law. I just like the word “schmass.”

Sometimes I think that the best part of my papers are the titles. I called my paper, “Schmassive problems with zombies in modality and metaethics.”

If you will direct your attention to the graph, you can see that there were a couple plateaus in my productivity, right around lunch-time and dinner-time, which is to be expected, but I generally worked well up until the end. Speaking of the end, the end of this paper officially marks the end of the course-work for my MA. If I don’t want to, I don’t ever have to attend a class again.

Actually, I suppose that’s been true since I graduated high school. I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment. I didn’t have to go to university, and I didn’t have to go to grad school after that. And since attendance isn’t really taken at the university level, even though I did decide to go to university, I could have skipped class. (Actually, that’s not true. Many of my profs take attendance in my seminars. I should have skipped class back in my undergrad days when I had the chance.)

Tomorrow I start work, and I’ll let you know how that goes. I called in this afternoon to confirm that I’m coming in and to find out what time I start. I start at 9h. I’ve never had a real 9-5 before.

I’m going to hit the sack early and hope to feel all better by tomorrow. If not, I still have most of a big bottle of easy-to-swallow analgesics, so I should be all right.

Oh, does anyone have a suggestion for a work of fiction for me to read? I finished the Deptford Trilogy recently, and I’m looking for something to fill my “things that I read on the Métro” void.

Almost done

I’m almost done writing my last essay. It’s on zombies. I’m not even kidding. Zombies are surprisingly important in philosophy of mind and metaethics, and a lot of ink has been spilled by philosophers over a thought experiment involving them.

This is the last assignment for my coursework for my MA. After this, the only thing that’s left is my thesis. Depending on what I decide to do after I graduate, I may never sit in a classroom again.