Twitter-dee, Twitter-dum

A few weeks ago I succumbed to the Twitter phenomenon, signing up for an account, acquiring as many followers as possible, and even adding a Twitter widget to this blog. I have to admit that I used to think Twitter was the absolute dumbest thing ever, but my innate sociable personality overruled my more reasonable thoughts, and thus I created an account.

It wasn't until the Iran election fiasco and subsequent terrifying aftermath that my opinion on Twitter started to shift. At a time when the authoritarian Iranian government was shutting down conventional media, Twitter became the only mechanism to get information out of the country. I gained a new respect for a service I had relegated to people famous for being famous - say, Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian, for example. But still, it seems that before the inspiring coverage from Iranian citizens in their "Green Revolution", Twitter seemed a fad headed for the same fate as Pogs, Tamagotchis, and Furbies. As Bill Maher put it, "Twitter didn't save Iran. Iran saved Twitter."

Then there's that little issue of the company actually making money. How many of you know that Twitter has been around since August 2006? That's so long ago that Democrats couldn't capitulate to insurance companies in Congress because they still weren't in power! All sad jokes aside, the company has been around this long and still hasn't developed a working business model to do what companies need to survive - you know, make a profit.

So whether you think Twitter still is just a medium that lets people squeeze out their 16th minute of fame or a reputable service that will help replace dictators with democracy, all of this is moot if they can't monetize all their new site traffic. Instead of seeing the little Twitter bird advertising its own service, maybe it will be forced to join the Pets.com sock puppet and do a double promo for BarNone car loans.

Saddness Over Steroids

So this afternoon we learned that in 2003 Los Angeles Dodger (and former Boston Red Sox) player Manny Ramirez, and current Red Sox player David "Big Papi" Ortiz, tested postive for performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). These two players were part of the 100+ players that tested positive under MLB's initial drug screening program, the results of which were supposed to remain annonymous. However, because the documents were never destroyed, it was only a matter of time before names would be leaked out, and Ramirez and Ortiz are not the first two players to be tied to this list. Just a few months ago Alex Rodriguez was reportedly on that list, and he admitted as such a few days later.

I'm not shocked whenever I hear names from the list trickle out ever so slowly or even that Ramirez is on this list after serving a 50 game suspension for testing positive this year. I wish the names would all be released at once, but that is something the players' union will never agree to. But the emotion I feel most is saddness, mostly because I can't think of the euphoric 2004 Red Sox season and their first World Series title in 86 years without now thinking about steroids.

I happen to be a Red Sox fan despite growing up in Yankee/Met territory. I've been to more games at Fenway Park than Yankee Stadium, and I was even at Derek Lowe's no-hitter in 2002. I was ecstatic when the Red Sox ended their championship drought and the Curse of the Great Bambino, and I was even more happy that they came back from an 0-3 deficit against the "Evil Empire" in the 2004 ALCS. But we cannot forget that newly-implicated PED user David Ortiz won both games 4 and 5 in Boston with walk-off hits. Could history have been different in Ortiz was not using PEDs? Look at his production the last two years, which has dropped precipitously. Yes, he had an injury last year, but he supposedly has been healthy all this year and is still not the "Big Papi" of old.

Many will say that there are way bigger issues to deal with than steroids in baseball, and I definitely agree. It seems that a lot of progressives seem hateful of sports, detesting their so-called waste of resources and attention grabbing. I agree to an extent, but I still think that sports give us a little bit of relief from our stressful lives. Plus, some of my best memories of my childhood (such as playing at the Cooperstown Dreams Park and getting a game-winning ball for blocking home plate as catcher and saving a win!) are from sporting events.

And that is the saddest part of this story. I've always wondered about the line where childhood ends and adulthood begins. People talk about heightened personal responsibility, more independence, even the end of "cooties". But I suppose there's no better measure than when the game of baseball stops being innocent fun and starts being a sport of big business and player disappointment. Unfortunately, that transition is trending earlier than later in today's era.

A Forum For Interaction - The Key to a Successful Blogger

The are millions of blogs in existence, yet many of them are locked in invisibility, consumed by the vastness that is the Internet. To have a strong readership of your blog, you should aim to have the following elements - high quality commentary, consistent postings, content appealing to at minimum a niche subset of the population, and a forum for interaction. People have gotten lucky by being the first one to "catch the wave" of a newly-developing fad, but most of these blogs have transient readership.

I believe that the last element - forum for interaction - is extremely vital to a blog's success. In our Media 2.0 world, it is no longer good enough to offer a one-way direction in our commentaries; old media formats, such as newspapers and even television, are behind the times in allowing for reader response. With the advent of YouTube and Twitter, television is becoming more viewer response-friendly, but you must remember that these responses are still filtered at some level.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas pioneered this two-way form of communication (i.e. - blogosphere) and transformed this medium into an effective model for two-way communication. I must profess that I frequent this blog much, so obviously I have a favorable opinion of it, but it is simple fact that a majority of the most followed bloggers on that website are not "front pagers" (Daily Kos terminology for salaried staff bloggers) but instead effective and influential community activists, authors, and even scientists. Most of these people were, pardon my harshness here, nobody of importance until they happened to fall upon this Media 2.0 format. These people were not the Founding Fathers of this movement, and yet they have gained so much influence that they meet with Congresspeople regularly to discuss important issues. Clearly, this improved access demonstrates the power of the Media 2.0 movement.

Bloggers like nyceve, bonddad, and teacherken are successful because they adhere to the elements for success above. The write well, they post almost on a daily basis, they each have a specific topic of focus (health care, U.S. financial system, teaching/history, respectively), and they all utilize the forum for interaction provided by the overall Daily Kos site.

I don't mean to make this a pro bono advertising session for Daily Kos, but clearly the results of these successful bloggers point to the extreme importance for a two-way form of communication. Each one of these individuals can fulfill three of the four success elements on their own, but without the forum for interaction, the chances that all of them, or even one of them, would be as influential and followed are severely lessened.

That's why the concept of blogs as a medium format is so revolutionary. Even though two-way communication is a fundamental part of our existence as humans, a la relationships, it is often antithesis to the goals of journalism ("just the facts, ma'am") or even editorials ("I'm right, you're wrong"). If anything, the reason why Media 2.0 has been so successful is because it's simply reuniting us with our human nature.

My message here is that I want you to participate in this blog. Though this blog is inherently about me and my experiences, values, and opinions, if you have a different perspective about something or a different experience, I want to hear it. It's why I enjoy posting links on Facebook, because I can reach a strong list of potential readers who can share their own thoughts.

So I eagerly invite you to participate in this blog. Post comments right to my posts. Email me comments. Twitter me comments. If you have your own blog, make a a post about my post, with your added thoughts. As I've demonstrated above, the two-way Media 2.0 communication form is vital to a blog's success, so feel free to write me comments back in my direction. Otherwise, how else can I improve on success elements one through three?

Cheers,

Mike C.

Pathway to Penn: Finding the Right Graduate Program For You

Yesterday, I began my "Pathway to Penn" series as both a window into my first-hand experiences on applying to graduate school (and ultimately ending up at Penn), as well as some general information and advice to prospective applicants. Yesterday's post dealt with deciding if graduate school is really the most appropriate option for you. Once you cross that hurdle and ultimately decide that graduate school is an appropriate option, the next step is to research various types of programs.

**Note - I will be tagging all posts in this series with "Pathway to Penn", so as my blog grows, if you want to refer back to any of these posts, just search that label.

If you can remember your time researching numerous undergraduate institutions, you know that it can be a meticulous and time-consuming process. It's hard enough to investigate, save, and compare details of a handful of schools while in high school, but it can be an even more involved task with the academic workload that comes with your late-junior and early-senior years. Therefore, I'm going to provide you with some good places where to start, as well as some general advice.

For prospective graduate students, a good place to start is by looking at the authors of journals you use as references in your own undergraduate research. It may also be helpful to look at some of the editors of journals your P.I. publishes in or where you retrieve a lot of your references. Obviously, some of these researchers will be outside of the USA, but most of them probably conduct research within our borders. This is especially helpful if you are interested in ultimately choosing a dissertation topic on a genre you have worked with as an undergraduate.

Another good source for starting your school search is to ask faculty with whom you have worked with, either via research or course work. They will likely know some specifics about a program, in regard to its reputation in a particular area. A good example is the University of Washington Medical School, which is an outstanding school for primary care.

Despite all of the advice you can receive from peers and mentors, ultimately you will have to do some information cataloging yourself, which requires you heading off to each respective program's website and seeing what they offer. A good way to establish a list of schools is by using the U.S. News & World Report website. As a caveat, there has been some controversy about these rankings, especially on the undergraduate side, but if you use them simply as a list of overall schools plus particular areas in which certain schools excel, then you should encounter no problems.

At this stage in your application process I wouldn't put too many restrictions on the potential programs you choose, if any at all. If, for example, you are from New England and insist you wouldn't want to head over to the west coast to attend graduate school, that doesn't mean you should automatically exclude any schools from that region. The time for narrowing down your list, and the criteria for doing so, will come later. At this point you should be looking for schools that offer a graduate program that matches your research history and interests. I cannot stress this point enough, as it is customary for graduate programs to reject well qualified students because their research history and interests don't match their program. With graduate applications increasing and endowments falling at many universities, you can't afford to have many of these schools on your final list, as you will be self-rejecting yourself from the start.

I added Penn to my list on the recommendation of one of my good friends, who himself happens to also attend the university (though in the School of Law). I researched the BGS website and found myself impressed with their areas of focus. Penn is the world leader in gene therapy/genetic engineering research, and while at the moment I'm not signed up for that area, this fact heightened my interest in the program. Additionally, I had the Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences as Washington University in St. Louis as a top-3 choice because one of the editors of the Journal on Bone Mineral Research (JMBR) (a journal my undergraduate lab publishes in and cites from) is a professor in the DBBS program.

Finally, a word on the decision of whether or not to include your undergraduate institution on your list for graduate school. As a rule of thumb, I would always include it in the initial list, but depending on what field you are in, it may be best for you to exclude your undergraduate school. Some in the field may question your research background and environment if you are at a school for 10+ years; it's similar to politicians "being inside Washington, D.C. too long". Additionally, your undergraduate school may even forbid you from applying to graduate school in a particular program, as is the case with the Psychology department at my alma mater, Rutgers University. Ultimately, it comes down to how strong your undergraduate institution is (no one is going to question you for staying at Harvard for 10+ years) as well as whether or not their graduate program matches you. As a rule of thumb, however, the overwhelming majority of students attend a different graduate school than their undergraduate school.

The next post in the series will focus on acquiring additional information about programs from reputable third-party websites, which can provide you a more "what is life like in this program" feel than the information provided on school websites.

I will also interject with some non-Pathway to Penn series of posts to maintain commentary on a wide range of topics, so to those of you reading my posts but not interested in attending graduate school, stick around!

Cheers,

Mike C.

Pathway to Penn: Deciding That Graduate School Was the Right Decision

It's about three weeks before I move down to Philadelphia, and since this blog will be about my time as an actual graduate student rather than a prospective one, I figure I would take this time to tell you about my "Pathway to Penn", as I call it. Though I will focus on my individual instances along the "applying to graduate school" process, you should be able to take general advice about the overall process. Pursuing graduate school is a highly-intensive process, and while I chose to pursue a graduate program in molecular biology, the following steps are quite similar for any graduate school search. These steps include:

-Personal affirmation of your post-undergrad decision
-Researching different schools and their respective programs
-Acquiring information from third-party websites to get a more individual taste of each school (which I will provide later)
-Starting online applications (takes a lot longer than you think)
-Taking appropriate graduate entrance exams (i.e. - GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.)
-Getting (at minimum) three letters of recommendation (extremely important)
-Writing personal statements/descriptions of research (also extremely important)
-And finally, hitting submit and waiting for those hopeful interview invitations!

I will focus this post on the first item in the process, which is the initial checkpoint in the graduate school process. Ultimately, you must personally decide is graduate/medical/law school REALLY what I want to do after my undergrad years? To truly come to an answer to this seemingly simple question is a lot more difficult that it appears. Like most everything in life, applying to graduate school is filled with nuances that make it unique to each applicant. However, there are several criteria that you can use to make your decision a truthful one.

First, as an undergrad, have you had your goals set on a professional education? Or is it a whim kind of thing (everyone's doing it)? With the economy currently in a deep hole, a lot of college grads are applying to graduate school because they want to postpone entering the job market for as long as possible. Sure, they will learn some new things along the way, but is the Return On Investment (ROI) positive? Graduate school isn't cheap, and unless you happen to be set on a program in the sciences - which offers generous fellowships from federal research dollars and university endowments - you will almost surely have to take out loans to pay for tuition, not to mention living expenses. Piling on upwards of $60,000+ in more debt for a two-year Masters program, plus living expenses, could lead to a starting salary of $4,000 - $5,000 more per year, if you're lucky. You will have to work 12 years just to break even on the ROI, and really $60,000 in debt is a very low-ball type of estimate.

Second, does your desired career require an advanced degree? For example, if you are set on being a lawyer, doctor, or professor, then it's incumbent on going to an advanced degree program. If you're interested in becoming a Public Relations or Communications employee, or in the case of my brother, you're intent on receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, then you should probably rethink graduate school.

Third, and last, has your undergraduate experience, both in and out of the classroom, prepared you to be a qualified advanced degree student? Have you taken the appropriate courses for your intended professional field? Have your extracurriculars matched your desire to attend graduate school? And most importantly, do you feel accomplished and excited for the application process?

This last element was especially important to me. A fact not too well known about me is that I originally planned to go to medical school. However, I never was interested in the taking the appropriate measures to be a successful and prepared applicant. I had no desire to volunteer in a hospital or private practice, despite a strong demand from local hospitals for student volunteers. I wasn't involved in any medical school organizations, such as AMSA or FIMRC. And finally, simultaneous with my apathy for medical school was my deep passion for my undergraduate research. I was even registered to take the MCAT in my junior year, but canceled after a long self-reflection period about what direction I wanted to head after finishing my undergraduate degree at Rutgers. Once I decided on graduate school, I became energized with the application process and knew that the decision was the right one.

I hope this first post in my "Pathway to Penn" series has been helpful for prospective graduate/medical/law students. I will continue the series with posts on the other application steps I mentioned above, offering stories of my own process as well as helpful websites and recommendations to ensure a smooth application process.

Lastly, in other news I finally got my UPenn email today! I've waiting all summer to get this thing up and running, and I'm glad it's in gear. I've signed up for the UPenn network on Facebook, which was part of my anxiousness to getting the email address activated.

As always, comments welcomed and encouraged. I hope to make this a blog that isn't merely individual commentary of my life as a graduate student and other interesting topics, but a back-and-forth community of dialogue.

Cheers,

Mike C.

Feelings of Nostalgia

I know what you're all thinking. My words aren't exactly being printed on the same stuff the ancient Egyptians used, if you know what I mean. So then, what's the deal with my blog name "Penn to Paper"? What was I thinking with this title, publishing my thoughts in this ironically titled reverse anachronism?

My new period of life begins in just about a month, and thinking about my new beginnings rekindled memories of the past. Every so often, I bring out my high school yearbook and read all of the wishes my friends and teachers wrote me, seeing if their words were fulfilled. Naturally, you can tell who your real friends from high school were by what they wrote next to their portrait. A simple "Congrats, best of luck in the future, keep in touch" most likely signals a person not too interested in actually keeping in touch. But that is a topic for another post.

What struck me most about the cursive notes was one I spotted in my twin brother's yearbook. It reads "Be cool. Don't bow to society or give up. And don't forget that film came first."

In the intended context, it's a history lesson for my digitally-focused photographer/graphic designer twin brother, who while owns several film cameras and enjoys the dark room experience, has made a full transition to film-less photography. In context for the rest of us, it reminds us of our humble roots.

I'm slowly coming to the realization that in about a month I will (baring extreme unforeseen circumstances) never live at home again. While I'm excited about my opportunities to further develop my intellectual, moral, and social life, the prospects of moving away from home is still a bit uneasy for me. But like the title of this specific post makes reference to, my fondness for my past will provide a link between times past, present, and future. Nostalgia doesn't simply refer to prior events, it implies a strong emotional connection to the past, a feeling of warmth and just plain goodness. Nostalgia is the element that drives the plot for our adventurous, humorous, and heartwarming stories. And most importantly for me, nostalgia demands keeping well in the present.

When my six years of graduate school are complete, it would be a shame if the same pleasant aura of nostalgia that has followed me throughout my life would be absent, as it would mean my time at Penn was not fulfilling. Believe me, I don't anticipate making this happen.

So thus, the name of this blog actually is appropriate. Before millions of people shared their thoughts to the world via this vast silicon jungle of blogs and servers, they shared them with themselves in diaries and notebooks. Though I've caught up with the times by using a blog, thus also sharing my words to the world, maybe I'll actually benefit the most from sharing them with myself. I would think maintaining my pleasant feelings of nostalgia is dependent on it.