inching toward extinction.

Week 29

A lot of good stuff happened this week.

I had to write up a draft of a paper for Professor Who Hates Me, which was stressful and time-consuming but well worth it.  I spent a lot of time reading some truly fascinating research, and I think I may have stumbled upon a great research idea.  I’m going to run it past my adviser when I get the chance to see what she thinks of it.

I’m actually really liking my class with Professor Who Hates Me.  Not least of all because my entire cohort is in it with me.

I had two additional interviews for externships.  One I wasn’t entirely sold on but could work, and the other was at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  The doctor at MSK was telling me all about this really intriguing research she’s working on.  It was exciting stuff…the idea of getting to help with that at this major institution.

But on Thursday, I got an offer from a different hospital.  It’s much more suited to my long-term goals, even though it’s not as “cutting-edge” as MSK.  I’ll be doing pediatric neuropsych evals starting this summer!  Should be really fun.  The only thing that was drawing me to MSK was the research aspect, but it’s not even in my field, so it’s better that I’ll be working with kids and doing more clinically-based work.

I went out last night with my friend Amy from my lab, and we discussed how great our adviser is and what kind of research we’d each like to do.  For the vast majority of the last 29 weeks, I’ve been contemplating switching advisers entirely.  I’m still interested in trying out other labs and switching advisers, but I think I’d like to stay on at least one or two projects with my current adviser.  It will be much easier once Amy starts the PhD program.  She’ll have some cool projects running and I can focus on those rather than all of the other non-psychopathy stuff.

I see a bunch of people posting about their celebrity sightings.

I’d just like to say that one time I saw Ryan Gosling on 3rd Ave and it was like staring into the sun and then I died and now I am a hollow shell of a ghost-human.

On Plagiarism.

In 8th grade, my writing teacher gave us an assignment.  She handed out a bunch of old magazines to the class and asked us each to tear out an image that inspired us.

I tore out an editorial photo from a teen fashion magazine of a young girl standing in front of a large, gray, concrete wall with a crack running through it. The model was staring out at the reader, expressionless, as models are wont to do.

We were then given a week or so to write a creative short story revolving around the photo we chose.

I wrote a lengthy tale about a young girl with a troubling family life.  I believe it was something along the lines of her mother dying, and her father subsequently treating her quite poorly, alternately beating her and neglecting her, or something equally awful.  I don’t remember the details.  Except the part where one day she snaps and murders her father.  She then carves up his body and effectively buries him in the wall, filling it in with concrete.

Needless to say, my parents were phoned, and I was undoubtedly recommended for counseling.

But I just remember my science teacher stopping me in the hallway and asking if I’d ever read The Cask of Amontillado.  I didn’t end up reading it until the following year in high school English class, but I went back to visit my 8th grade science teacher and we had a good chuckle about my sorta-kinda inadvertent plagiarism.

I still don’t think there were enough similarities to call it plagiarism, but I also don’t think I was a very disturbed child.

Week 28

So, this week I had to deal with the crushing disappointment of not getting an externship offer, paired with the overwhelming humiliation of being the only one in my cohort that did not get an offer.  Followed shortly by the rushed panic of having to apply to six more sites and cram more interviews into the 7-day period that also happens to contain the largest amount of writing and reading I’ve had due thus far in grad school.

Sigh.

There are also all these awkward moments where everyone, students and professors alike, is all excited and asks everyone where they will be working next year.  The professors will go around the room and ask, and I’ll just have to sheepishly say I’m still interviewing, which is code for “ALERT! ALERT! ZERO OFFERS! ZERO OFFERS!”

I had a bright moment on Tuesday.  In class, our professor had been asking us what we perceived to be our strengths and weaknesses as potential therapists.  I was not feeling so great about myself after all that externship nonsense, so everything that popped into my head was along the lines of “I would make a terrible therapist, so you should just cut your losses and kick me out of the program now”, and what came out of my mouth was along the lines of “uhhhhhh…..ummmm…..uh….I’m….a….uh….good listener?”  And the professor kind of tilts her head and nods and doesn’t ask me any more questions because she feels really weird, and I feel really weird, so we both just pretend that didn’t happen and move on.

But the bright moment came after class, back in the office, when I was wallowing in my misery and eating stacks of Oreos.  One of my cohort members, out of nowhere, says, “Hey Danielle, I think a good answer for that strengths question would have been genuineness.”  I had no idea what he meant, so I kind of raised my eyebrows at him.  ”You know, I think you’re very genuine, and I know that’s a quality that a lot of Rogerian therapists really value, and I think that’s one of your strengths.”  I thanked him, even though I wasn’t convinced.  I’ve been pondering this for a few days now and I’m still not entirely sure that genuine is the best word to describe me, but I’ll take it.

I had a handful of other weird moments this week, including:

• I ran into a girl from my lab at my therapist’s office
• I was proctoring an exam for undergrads and one of the TAs called a student an idiot
• I was interviewing at the hospital I used to intern at and the interviewer asked me why I didn’t get any other offers
• I spoke with my adviser about cutting back my hours in the lab, and then the person who was meant to take over about 5 hours of mine told everyone that he was going to be out of the lab for a month
• I watched a movie for class with my cohort, and then they spent almost four hours talking about their troubling lives…and I didn’t want to talk about my life, but one person brought up some shit I had divulged a few weeks ago, and they basically pressured me to talk about it…but then they continued to interrupt me throughout and didn’t let me finish…

One hell of a week.