return from the figurative dead

Well, I've taken quite a hiatus from this blog, which is unfortunate, considering it is supposed to be about my grad school process and most of my activity on that front has occurred in the last month. For me, it got to be an overwhelming balance of thinking/talking about the decision all the time (and probably driving everyone, including myself, insane) and not being comfortable with sharing the details of such a personal choice with the anonymous viewership. (Partially because of my acute sensitivity of anyone from work reading or misinterpreting this blog). In any case, here's a quick rundown:

- It was a tough choice. At the end of the day, I was deciding between Brown, who has an amazingly fluid, multi-disciplinary degree but whose program seemed very inchoate in terms of the overall picture; Columbia, which is a public health powerhouse (but I was afraid it was a bit of an MPH-mill...not to mention the hefty pricetag), and Yale, who had the right balance of class size, research opportunity, and faculty interests that I was looking for. Plus, I really liked their approach of tackling social/behavioral health issues through the lens of epidemiology, something that the other programs just didn't have. So, off to Yale it is.

- I will be studying chronic disease epidemiology and social/behavioral sciences. Basically what that means is that I will be learning about and researching the confluence of behavioral, societal/cultural, organizational, and physicological factors on health. For anyone who knows my academic interests, this is a dream come true: a real combination of my passion for healthcare and my profound curiousity about what makes people act (and interact) the way they do. Why public health? Not only because of its interdisciplinary nature, as I just noted, but because more so than other disciplines (in my humble opinion), public health research is dynamic, relevent to the real world in real time (swine flu, anyone?), and the results can and are translated into programs that actually help people...not just bound in leather and stuffed into a remote library corner. Not to say other disciplines don't do these things as well, of course, it's just that for me, public health has just the right mix of pedagogy and practice).

Anyway, I'm sure I'm being overly idealistic about this, as I am with everything, and I'm trying to temper my excitement to avoid the inevitable bubble-bursting, but let's face it: I. am. pumped!



So the nature of this blog will be changing a bit. I want to blog about grad school, still, since that is and will become even more so a bigger part of my life, but I don't want to the focus to revolve around that...I'ts tiresome to constantly think about it on this blog when it consumes so much of my waking time otherwise! Instead, I'm going to aim for a combo of relevant health-related news, off-the-cuff thoughts about work, and the process of transitioning from the full-time workplace into the land of horn-rimmed glasses and over-used library cards....and walks of shame (more to come!)

This is a hasitly-scribbled, pretty boring post to start off my foray back into the blogging world, but I hope to be back with more and better material in the near future!