DOMINATING My Master's Degree

Sorry for the hiatus. I had a very crazy fall semester. No promises as to when I will post again, but one of my goals for the new year is to post at least once a month.

I just alluded to my crazy fall. A lot of the craziness had to do with my wife's employment. After an adventure into the corporate world, she started her own business at the end of the year (website still under construction, but check it out!). I am very proud of her for pursuing her dreams, and I hope that self-employment will bring her more happiness and fulfillment than the other jobs she has held recently.

My wife's employment status weighed on me heavily throughout the fall, but completing my Master's degree required just as much physical and emotional energy. A short timeline:

- Beginning of August: We had a scheduling meeting for our wind tunnel, and I was given a six week window to fit in the research for my MS degree. While operating the tunnel, I will simultaneously write my thesis. If everything goes according to plan, I can defend my thesis in early October and graduate in December. I need to be done with the tunnel by October 1st so another student can collect data for a conference in November.

- Middle of August: My six week window starts. The research/tunnel operation is rolling along nicely, but I am already behind on writing my thesis. Early mornings and late nights at the lab become too frequency (14+ hour workdays at least four times a week.)

- End of August to middle of September: The tunnel starts making strange (and alarming) noises. This means I have to shut everything down and diagnose the problem. This process takes about two weeks, and now I am behind on data collection and writing for my thesis. I cancel my October defense, and thus I won't meet the deadline to graduate in December.

- End of September to end of October: I finish taking data and complete my thesis. Once again, I became very familiar with my desk at the lab. I also wrote an extended abstract for a conference in June 2012 and created a presentation for another conference in November.

- November: I made some revisions to my thesis, attended a conference in Baltimore, spent Thanksgiving with my family, and prepared for my thesis defense.

- December 1st: MS defense passed. I will graduate with my MS degree in May.

This is how I felt after I completed my thesis defense. Gotta love Anchorman.

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So, in three and a half months, I collected, analyzed, and recorded all of my results. By the end, I was ready to sleep for 24 hours straight.

I learned a lot from the experience. First of all, I now know what to expect when I begin writing my Ph.D. dissertation. Secondly, I learned that attention to detail is critical. Moving forward, I need to document everything that I do thoroughly and investigate every avenue that arises during my research.  Most importantly, I learned that I do not enjoy working overtime. I like to push myself, but I realized that my highest priority can not be my work. I don't function well that way, and I don't like the person I became as I dragged my feet through the semester. So my second goal of the new year: work hard, but don't let work get in the way of my life. I don't want to miss my twenties (which I could be spending with my wife, my family, and my friends) because I was at the wind tunnel stressing about things that won't matter in the end.

After a small holiday, I am ready to get back to work. My advisor and I have created a plan for me to jump into my Ph.D. research. Luckily, I did not receive an email like this:

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What were your big accomplishments of 2011? What are your goals for the new year?

DOMINATING Diabetes & Health Insurance

... or perhaps health insurance trying to dominate me would be more appropriate.

Background: I was diagnosed with diabetes when I was 15. During drumline rehearsal one day, I got extremely dizzy and almost fainted. I remember excusing myself from practice and sitting in the hallway outside the band hall while I tried to collect myself. My sister told me that I looked as pale as a ghost. After school, I went to a physician with my parents, and I saw a blood glucose meter for the first time. My symptoms (dehydration, frequent restroom trips, weight loss, and a blood sugar of 420 mg/dl) were a pretty good indication of Type 1 Diabetes.

I have been told that I do a pretty good impression of this guy.

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In all seriousness, I think having diabetes has made me a stronger person. Over the past 9 years, I have done my very best to never let diabetes stop me from doing something. Eventually, I have no doubt that a cure will come along. I'll manage in the mean time.

The worst part about having diabetes: paying $$$ to take care of diabetes. Growing up, my parents always took care of this. Now that I am a big kid, the responsibility falls on me. I've always done a pretty good job of taking care of myself on my own, but over the past several years I have been taking on more and more of the responsibility for managing prescriptions, ordering supplies, and understanding the health care system. Now that I am married, I get all of those responsibilities plus the fun task of forking over the cash to take care of myself.

Thus the necessary evil: health insurance.

Let me set my position on health insurance. Health insurance seems like an industry where both the clients and the employees know practically nothing about what they are doing. The clients just want their medicine without going broke; they don't care how that happens. The employees of health insurance companies are then trained to help the above group; if you try to be an educated consumer, the typical insurance employee will not be able to answer your questions. All they really know how to do is process people and keep the typical consumer happy. I find the entire system frustrating, particularly because insurance is the only way that I can afford to pay for all of the diabetes testing supplies and insulin pump supplies that I need to take care of myself.

All of this health insurance talk came about because of annual enrollment at Texas A&M. I need to decide whether or not to get insurance through A&M before July 31st. Thanks to Obama Care, I can stay on my parents insurance until I am 26; however, there are questions looming with that option as well. Hopefully I will make a solid decision based on the information I can squeeze out of various health care / prescription companies. But I refuse to let health insurance DOMINATE me or get me down. So health insurance, you are going to get a roundhouse kick to the face (sometime between now and July 31st)!

Does anyone else find health insurance frustrating? Does anyone else watch The Price Is Right just to see the Liberty Medical commercials? :D

DOMINATING LIFE Starting Today

Hello to my dedicated following (of zero people). My name is Matt, and I am a calm, collected, steady person who needs a way to express himself. Enter this blog!

My wife thinks this is a really scary picture of me, but this is the quintessential DOMINATE picture.

Name of the Game? DOMINATION was a yell I did with a group I was (and still am) with in college. Whenever we do that yell, we are going to DOMINATE. Usually DOMINATING meant we would go lose a flag football game by 30 points. Or maybe it meant we were about to rock out on a performance at a show. Every time, it meant that we were going to have fun and enjoy whatever we were doing. 

This leads to the main motivation for starting this blog: to remind myself that I have one chance to live my life to the fullest. So why not DOMINATE life? This summer has been simultaneously awesome and horrible at the same time. I got married, saw my sister got married, made a home with my wife, and gotten some much needed R&R. At the same time, I haven't accomplished what I would have liked on my research for graduate school, I've distanced myself from friends, and I feel like I am no longer exerting myself to be the best person I can be. I hope that this blog is a constant reminder to live my life and go for it. Enter inspirational poster that I can make fun of...

I feel like the lines on this poster can only be read very slowly, in a deep voice.

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My second motivation for this blog is to force my mind to create sentences not related to graduate school. Writing is a large portion of what I do as a graduate student. That being said, writing about Tollmien-Schlicting Waves and the Orr-Sommerfeld Equation is not the same as writing about my life and the adventures I have. So please try to stick with me as I try to form my own writing style.

This blog will be the place where I will describe how I DOMINATE the challenges and adventures that life presents. No excuses. No regrets. So here we go!!!