The Southern Part of Heaven

So, this my first time blogging (not surprising), but I figured I had waited long enough to maintain my "laggard" status for adopting new innovations. Jenny even joined Facebook this week (so maybe there is hope for us).

North Carolina is great! I have been here for two weeks now. It is definitely way greener over here, as Eli said, than the brown of Utah (which I miss). I make it a point to ask everyone I meet here how they like it in the "Southern Part of Heaven", as Dr. Cole called it in a recent email. Everyone says they love it here (even if they are not from here) and then start listing off the reasons I should move here. I think some of the people I ask that question could go on for hours about it (I think one lady at Church would've if my ride wasn't leaving). The only two people I met who didn't absolutely love it here, but just liked it, were the missionaries (both from Utah). I feel kind of bad for them, though, because they told me they just sweat through their shirts and ties all over the place during the summer when they are out in the hot, North Carolina sun and humidity. One Elder even told me that last summer he and his companion would come home for lunch, take their white shirts off, put them in the dryer, and then put them back on again when they left for the afternoon. Sweating through your clothes like that just sounds awful (which makes it understandable that the missionaries just like it here instead of loving it).

My committee had a really interesting requirement for me to complete before I left Utah...I had to become a licensed pesticide applicator. Weird, huh? They wanted me to become licensed so that I would have some perspective on what is and is not required to be a licensed pesticide applicator, the people in my data set, and to maybe understand more about different pesticides and application methods. Anyway, they told me this at my proposal defense on May 1st (a Friday), I got the materials (a book and some packets) on May 4th (a Monday), scheduled an appointment May 5th to take the two exams on May 6th, took them on May 6th, and left for North Carolina on May 9th. It was a bit of a whirlwind, but since I was only licensing to be a private pesticide applicator (so I can spray pesticides on my own farm, if I ever have one, but not someone else's), the exams were open book. The exams took me four hours, but I passed both and am sure it was nothing like the MCAT was for Brad (or the GRE, for that matter). I thought it was really funny that I had to become licensed, so I told my mentor, Dr. Kamel, when I got here. She was actually really impressed that my committee (Merrill, Cole, Lindsay) was so practical and even brought it up a few days later.

My mentor is great, she seems pretty understanding of how it is to work with an intern. She is probably in here early 60s and is quite short (way shorter than I imagined from her picture on the NIEHS website). My data set is huge! They gave me 1,658 variables for 89,658 people. It took SAS about 18 minutes to even read in the data! My first week was spent getting familiar with the data set, going through the code books and searching for variables that might be relevant to our analysis, and printing frequencies for them (thank goodness for proc freq). I use SAS every day and for the majority of my time (which I am loving...I know, I know...the word you're all thinking applies to me right now is "sadistic"). My second week was spent using logistic regression (which is my new favorite statistical method) to produce odds ratios for various demographic variables. Interesting find so far: the pesticide applicators that were most likely to commit suicide drank alcohol every day and, here's the really interesting part, they only drank 1-2 drinks each time they drank. In other words, the applicators that committed suicide weren't binge drinkers (Yes, it is weird, and even disturbing sometimes, doing an analysis of suicide, but maybe something good will come from this and other related research so that mortality due to suicide will be reduced among pesticide applicators). Anyway, I won't bore you all anymore with that.

I have probably written too much already, but I think I should mention just one more thing. I attend "Repro Lunch" every Wednesday (at least until I have to start attending weekly seminars for summer students at the same time in a couple of weeks). Repro Lunch is a group of epidemiologists and biostatisticians here that get together and discuss reproductive epidemiology papers/research over lunch (stop laughing, Ashley). The first one was about the effect of grandmother's smoking on the birth weight of their grandchildren. There was no association between the two, but it was really interesting hearing the epidemiologists discuss why the paper was garbage and shouldn't have even been published (much like Dr. Cole did in Environmental Health Sciences to the metal in fish in South Africa paper). The second one dealt with particular genes that affect alcohol metabolism in the mother and the baby in utero (I hope I used "in utero" correctly--it just means in the uterus, right?). It was way above my head epidemiologically, statistically, and especially genetically/biologically.

Well, I'll write again soon. I was extremely glad to hear Liz found a fieldwork. Good job! Later.