Makin' plans.

First things first: This fall, I am starting graduate studies at Purdue University, where I'm looking to get a PhD in statistics. The acceptance came after over months of nail-biting and demoralizing news from other schools. I was impressed with Purdue's department when I visited the campus last week, and I'm really looking forward to being a part of the academic community there.

I've been offered a funded position in professor Rebecca Doerge's research group on bioinformatics. This is a branch of stats that I've been considering for some time, and involves learning about genetics, biology, genomics, and programming, in addition to statistics. I'm excited to get to start on projects right from the first year. Professor Doerge is reputedly a great mentor, and it is very likely that she will eventually advise my dissertation.

While in India I thought off-and-on about trying my hand at travel writing, or freelance photography, or continuing on indefinitely with my nomadic life. But taking this break away from school only reconfirmed my conviction to return to academics, where I most belong.

However, there is still a summer ahead of me before I relocate to West Lafayette, Indiana, and I'm really going to milk it.

During the month of May, I will go to Hong Kong for a week or so. After that, I want to head to the mainland and see some of the southern countryside, with its green rice paddies, villages, and mountains. June and July will be spent visiting relatives in Hunan province and attending the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai which promises to be a huge affair. If I do some sweet-talking, I'll have my father's professional SLR camera on loan while in China, in which case one of my primary goals while traveling will be to capture beautiful images.

For the first time in a year, I feel secure in my future plans. Uncertainty had its place, but right now, it's a relief to look forward to something concrete.

Visa/work update.

After stressing out about my visa extension for weeks, the matter has finally finally been resolved. I appealed to the vice president of my company as a last resort, and he agreed to give me the document I needed to officialize the extension. My fourth time at the FRRO, they stamped my passport, and when I made a movement to pay the fee, they brushed me off and told me to go home. I suppose that even the visa officials realize that it flat-out sucks to be caught up in this mess.

Work has significantly improved. I just finished a month-long assignment of inventing problems and solutions for 12th-grade math textbooks, covering mostly calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations. The task was actually quite tricky, as it involved starting with a solution I wanted and working backward to formulate a question. Since I finished that, my superiors have started treating me differently, giving me more and more assignments, consulting my opinion like it matters, and giving me a company email address. I also just got my paycheck and it was more than was written on my contract. Things are looking up.

So now I get to stay in India until February 15th, after which I'll head to Nepal for a few weeks before catching my flight from Delhi to Nashville on March 5th. Until then, the time is mine to play with!