Epoch

Spring quarter has drawn to a close: my rotation ends this Friday, and my classes are done. I have a take-home final to complete, and then my first year in graduate school has concluded.

I think I will do a 4th rotation this summer, in a lab that does work related to biofuels. I've always been interested in the aging process, but I think so long as there is an important big picture behind my work, I will be satisfied with my research. Aging is certainly a relevant and important problem, but so is the energy problem, after all.

I'm planning on taking a couple of weeks of downtime before I start, however, to rest, and to teach myself a few things that have come up over and over again this year that I have little to no background in. First up: statistics! I'm armed with a fairly rigorous mathematical statistics/data analysis book, and I'm going to bull through this thing before I take another step scientifically. I'm also hip-deep into learning Python, the other thing I'm dead set on becoming competent with before I jump into my next (and possibly final?) lab.

Also, I've made up my mind about the whole last name thing -- I think I'm really going to do it! I talked to my folks about it, and everybody was super cool with it, surprisingly. Dad said that he liked having a unique last name, but the whole unpronounceable-ness aspect of it kinda bugged him, too. Anyway, I decided that Peterson would be a pretty good choice. I like the sound of it, and it's easy to pronounce. Dad liked it, too. You know, I've never liked the naming convention in our culture, because our names don't mean anything. If you think about common names like Smith or Carpenter or whatever, people took on those names because they were descriptive -- they actually were blacksmiths and carpenters. So the name Peterson appeals to me on this level, because it's at least descriptive -- I'm Peter's son. It's not Greek, but I figure, I'm a quarter Greek, and a quarter mixed northern European, so I don't feel like I'm misrepresenting my ancestry. The only downside is that it is sort of common, which isn't the greatest thing, I guess, but then, I figure, if my uniqueness as a person is tied to having a super hard to pronounce last name, I probably fail at life anyway!