While browsing through copies of old Nature volumes in the library, I happened to read an article titled, “What makes a good PhD student?” I was intrigued.

I am way past that point, having graduated about 7 years ago (my, has it been that long?). Honestly, I am not at all sure that I’ve gotten the most out of my PhD experience – for sure, half of the time I was struggling with the language barrier and trying my best to fast-track my learning of all the new tools at my disposal. The other half, well, I was trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to do with my life (I had musings like, do I really need a PhD? Why do I punish myself like this?).

In retrospect, I think that I had closely followed most of the pointers given by Chenevix-Trench. Working hard and long is a tried-and-tested formula, and arguably an unwritten rule for most university labs in Japan. I learned by observing how the other students in my laboratory worked – I didn’t know the full meaning of the word “workaholic” until I came to Japan. I didn’t want to lag and I surely didn’t want them to get the impression that Filipinos are lazy.

So I survived and produced a number of publications (more than I was hoping for, in fact) within the ideal timeframe. I made it a point to graduate in three years’ time, because I didn’t think that I would get any extension for my scholarship. It was make-it-or-break-it deal, no other way. Working long days all week surely was part of the strategy – but it was easy to do because I was not married yet, nor did I have any children then. Otherwise, things would have been entirely different.

But admittedly, the long hours only managed to help me maintain a virtually “constant” presence at the lab. I didn’t necessarily get more creative insights because I stayed longer at the lab. Interaction was minimal, so was the supervision. Still, I was working like crazy. Everyday I hit the sack exhausted and spent. From time to time, I asked myself, is this the way it’s supposed to be? And what exactly do I get from all of these? Times like that I really had trouble finding the right motivation and inspiration.

There is another article, also posted at Nature.com, which responded to Chenevix-Trench’s article. I am posting the whole article below. I found myself agreeing with most of what the authors wrote. The anecdote about Rutherford asking the student, “But when do you think?” hits the nail on the head. It’s an appropriate question not only for PhD students, but for researchers and postdocs as well. How much time do we really spend thinking as opposed to working? Somebody should have given me this article years ago. If I realized that there is more than one route to PhD, I probably would have taken a different path. But then again, it is still very much relevant to my current post-doc experience. It is very appropriate to my current situation now, because unlike when I was still a student, I now have a family of my own. Time is not a luxury I can afford anymore. I don’t own my weekends anymore; my family does.

More than one route to PhD success

Two researchers offer their take on how to succeed as a PhD student.
Sarah Bekessy1 & Brendan Wintle2

The idea of a one-size-fits-all model for PhD study is simplistic, patronizing and bad for science. A recipe such as Georgia Chenevix-Trench’s, detailed in “What Makes a Good PhD Student?” (Nature 441, 252; 2006) is just one model for PhD success.

It is a mistake to promote a corporate culture of bulging briefcases, long hours and working weekends as signs of good research practice. PhD students should be judged on their insight and the outcome of their work, not by the number of hours they spend working.

Ernest Rutherford once asked a student who was working one evening whether he also worked in the mornings. The student proudly answered yes. “But when do you think?” Rutherford replied. He was convinced that the creative scientists spent evenings and holidays relaxing with their families, and imposed strict limits on the hours his students worked. A high proportion of them went on to win Nobel prizes.

Chenevix-Trench’s model ignores calls from employers and graduates for PhD programmes that build transferable skills. In 2000, a survey by the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students found that most graduates believe that there are few research-only academic positions. Those surveyed wanted more interdisciplinary PhD programmes that encourage teaching experience and provide a meaningful entrée into faculty life. A survey by Bettina Nyquist and Jody Woodford of 365 individuals, including PhD students and people working in education, academia and government, also found graduate education to be too narrow (Reenvisioning the PhD: what are our concerns? Centre for Instructional Development and Research, University of Washington, Seattle; 2000).

Chenevix-Trench errantly blames high PhD attrition rates on poor academic standards and lack of passion or hard work. A study by Barbara Lovitts and Cary Nelson (Academe 6, 44–50; 2001) found no meaningful difference in academic performance between completers and non-completers. Graduate students who don’t finish their degrees are typically less integrated into the department, suffer intimidating, hostile or laissez-faire departmental culture, and have poor relationships with supervisors.

Academics must heed the serious consequences of poor supervision if they are to strive for the best outcomes for students and society.

1 Sarah Bekessy is a senior lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Australia2 Brendan Wintle is a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne.

I was searching for add-ons to our internet explorer 7 installation when I came across Windows Live Writer.  It is a free downloadable program provided by Windows Live. According to its description, it provides WYSIWYG editing capability allowing bloggers to know exactly how their blog items will look like before even publishing them to the web. Curious, I checked if it is compatible with Serendipity, our blogging software. Fortunately, Serendipity supports XML-RPC, a remote procedure calling protocol using HTTP (the one you use to access most websites) as the transport and XML (an extension of HTML commonly used in webpages) as the encoding. After setting up a couple of configuration, I had WLW running! And this is my first entry to check if it will work!

Windows Live Writer also allows offline editing. You can compose your blog offline using WLW and when you’re done, upload the entry to your website. No need to be online all the time. This is a very useful feature especially for those who are always on the go!

Adding a photo is also easy. Simply drag and drop your photo into the editor and WLW will automatically resize the image. Selecting the photo will give you several options as to the size, layout, and effects. You can also set the margins of the image. See our photo on the left. However, the first time I published this entry with the image gave an error. After searching the web, I discovered that I have to create a folder named WindowsLiveWriter in uploads directory (/uploads/WindowsLiveWriter) of s9y before the uploads will work.  Also, until now I still don’t know where to put the description of the image.

Ooppss, time to sign off. By the way, this is also my first blog entry.

At long last, our house is finally finished. It was turned over to us “bare,” and we waited for a year before starting on the renovations. Work on the house commenced as early as May this year; due to some unexpected delays, the completion of the house took almost half a year.

Casa mia!!!

Tunay na katas ng Japan yan (hehe). Talagang pinagplanuhan, pinaghirapan, pinag-ipunan. Years ago it was almost unthinkable that we would have a house like this. But we challenged ourselves; we worked hard and prayed hard. Through it all God has been faithful and blessed our plans. Poverty has also taught us very important lessons in life, and these lessons have been instrumental in helping us realize our goals. Well ladies and gentlemen, hard work, persistence, and patience finally paid off. My Dad would have been proud.

It is not the biggest house in the neighborhood, nor will it be the most beautiful one. But it is OURS. Rightfully, deservedly so.

Aya has actually performed a number of experiments this year; obviously, I haven’t had enough time to update the experiment blogs. But we have been continuously working on our experiments and having fun discovering new things together. It is such a joy to teach science to a kid – the wonders in their eyes would surely be worth the effort. And besides, it doesn’t really take that long to do one experiment. To parents out there, try devoting half an hour or so a week to sit down with your children and do these stuffs together. Promise, enjoy yan!

This is an experiment to teach children about magnetism. You will need the following:

1. 2 bar magnets and/or horseshoe magnets
2. Objects to test, e.g., objects made of plastic, spoon, coins, pencil, paper clips

*Bar magnets can be purchased at 100-yen Daiso stores.

First, Aya tested how the bar magnets behaved by making the north and south poles face each other.

Uy, nagdikit!

Aya then tried picking up the objects laid before her using the bar magnet.

The spoon sticked to the magnet! Amazing!

Uhm, it doesn’t seem to work here…

Nope, not even on the pen…

Aha, it worked on the can’s lid.

Variation: I made Aya rub the bar magnet on the hair pin.

Magnetized, the hair pin now picked up the screw.

Aya rubbed the hair pin with the bar magnet again, and this time tried picking up the paper clip. It worked again!

This experiment demonstrates a simple way for kids to learn about sounds, particularly, how sound makes movements. For this experiment, you will need the following:

1. Bowl
2. Plastic wrap (e.g., Saran wrap)
3. Rice
4. Metal tray
5. Metal spoon
It may be rather difficult to do this experiment alone for little kids, so it is recommended that adults take part in the performance of this experiment. Aya has to enlist the help of her Tita Lai to do this experiment.

Stretch the plastic wrap over the bowl as tightly as possible.

Next, scatter grains of rice across the top of the plastic wrap.

Then, hold the metal tray as close as possible to the bowl. Hit the tray with the spoon to make a loud noise. And I mean really loud! Observe what happens to the rice.

Explanation: Hitting the tray with the spoon makes the air around it vibrate; when the sound waves reach the plastic wrap, they make it vibrate. This makes the rice grains move.

It has been a year since I was diagnosed with SPVC (supraventricular premature contraction). I’ve been reading on the internet about other people with similar cases, and I am often surprised by how many people with varying ages and occupations have been diagnosed with similar conditions, albeit with varying degrees of intensities. Other people report worrisome symptoms like contractions every 5 heartbeats or so, feeling as if their hearts are on a roller-coaster ride. I think I got it easy. I mostly don’t even feel the contractions, most especially when my concentration is focused on something else. Nevertheless, for now I still make it a point to stay away from heavy physical activities like running or jogging. I don’t know if that will make things worse for me, and believe me, I would rather not find out.

The most important thing that I learned, over the year, is that mostly this is a mind-over-body play. Or a mind-over-heart play, if you will. The premature contractions are here to stay, whether I like it or not. But I also learned that if I make it a point to feel my pulse everytime or listen to my heart beat while quietly lying down, my senses become more acutely aware and it does seem as if the beats are becoming much stronger than usual. But if I just ignore them, everything feels as normal as ever. It has not diminished my capacity or performance in any way, so really, why worry about it?

I’ve been reassured that while it is untreatable, it is not life-threatening in the absence of any heart diseases. Of course, I don’t have the assurance that it will not become any worse as I get older, but for now that is certainly the least of my worries.

I find it rather amusing that people who have the same conditions refer to themselves as “sufferers,” as in “PVC (premature ventricular contraction) sufferers,” or “PAC (premature atrial contraction) sufferers.” Healthy individuals suffer only in the sense that their mind takes the mental blow of worrying each time a heartbeat goes out of whack.

There’s only one word of advice I can give to others out there: stop listening to your heart; listen to your mind. A perfectly normal lifestyle is not impossible. The only true suffering that we would end up experiencing is when we are bogged down by needless worries and anxieties. Let the heart beat its way; as for yourself, celebrate life and live to the fullest!

After all, we only have one life to live. It’s our choice.

I’ve recently upgraded my browser to IE7 – and admittedly, it’s made my browsing experience much more manageable and less worrying (for now). Actually, I wasn’t really interested in upgrading until the other day, when one of the websites I opened suddenly spewed popup messages about a certain DriveCleaner software attempting to scan my computer. Said software offered to scan my computer and remove all traces of adult porn sites that I’ve visited. What porn sites? Hello? Good thing that my Symantec antivirus automatically detected it as a security risk and promptly quarantined the malicious software.

Back to IE7. Here are some of the reasons why users would benefit by upgrading their IE version to 7: first off, streamlined interface. Gone are the menu bars including File, Edit, etc. Next is tabbed browsing – you’re gonna love tabbed browsing. With it, you can open multiple websites in a single window. Plus, it allows you to see thumbnail images of all open tabs in a single view! It is also possible to organize multiple tabs into a single tab group and save it as a favorite. Next, there is a new search box which you can customize – you can set a particular search engine (like Yahoo! or Google) to use when doing a search. It has made life much easier for me. I’ve been using Yahoo! toolbar for quite some time now, but since I am also using Google to do web searches, I had been contemplating on installing a Google toolbar as well. Well, now that I’ve installed IE7, I don’t need either toolbar anymore.

Other features which I haven’t tried yet, but are also incorporated into the current IE7 version: RSS feeds, automatically shrinking of text so all webpage content fits on your final printed page. And for those who are concerned about protection against malicious software, fraudulent websites and online phishing scams, IE7 has incorporated various tools against these. In IE7’s toolbar, you can set the popup blockers and phishing filters ON in order to protect yourself from these evils. In the Tools menu, you can see enable or disable add-ons for the browser. Imagine our surprise when in our home PC we found out that there is an eXact Advertising add-on in our IE browser, that has been making logs of all our search keywords without our knowledge! As to how we got that malicious software hacking into our browser, we could only guess. It has now been disabled, thanks to IE7.

Well there you have it. Need I say more? 🙂

Someone wise and older told me recently, “You are either No.1 or you are nobody.” I have mulled on this for a long time. I still am. But I have to agree that although that it’s a pretty harsh condition to impose on oneself, it does help in defining one’s perspectives in life.

I’ve been reading a lot of stories on the internet lately, about Filipinos who have succeeded in their chosen professions, careers, and businesses. I am both awed and humbled. And I am sure that their stories have been carefully chosen by the media people. It does make for good material – how they succeeded, how they managed to achieve their goals despite all odds, etc. The only catch is that most of them are Filipinos who are currently living abroad – it’s as if they could only have succeeded *because of* and not *despite of* living outside the Philippines. It sends a message to the readers that the greener pastures are “out there.”

But there is something that is frequently brought to the readers’ attention as well, and quoted so frequently that it simply grates the eyes: “The first Filipino”…to do this, to do that. It’s so much like the hype over the first Filipino who climbed Mt. Everest. Many people have been climbing Mt. Everest for God knows how long. It is already common knowledge that many people of various nationalities have already conquered the mountain. But do we really need to emphasize on the individual’s nationality? Does being a Filipino make someone any better at climbing mountains? Are we so hard up for recognition that we will seek each individual achievement as a boost to national pride? These achievements do not make up for the nation’s downward spiral towards chaos, graft and corruption, and moral disintegration.

Just yesterday I read about someone who was the first Filipino woman to graduate from some school in the States. Sorry, not just some school. A prestigious school – it just so happened that I’ve never heard of it until now. But who cares? Does anybody bother to know who the first Filipino Harvard graduate was? I rest my case.

This has become some sort of joke between me and Baggy. I told him, hey, YOU are the first and only Filipino in Grid Technology Center (and I know this to be a fact because the center has only been around for as long as I have been in Tsukuba, and I practically know all Filipinos who have ever been employed in our institute). And I could be the first Filipino woman who ever attended the applied superconductivity conference in Europe (though I have no way to verify this). The point is, if that sounds outright ridiculous to you, then you understand what I’m driving at.

There is nothing wrong with praising Filipino achievements, even if the individuals happen to be true-blooded Pinoys, Filipino-Americans, Filipino-Canadians, or Filipino-Timbuktuans. True recognition can never come from our own ranks, but from the rest of the world. We must not just show them that “Filipinos can do that, too” but that “Filipinos can do it better than you.” *We must be trailblazers on our own, not just followers or imitators.*

Originality has never been our forte. But it is never too late to change that. This is a challenge to every Filipino out there.

Aya loves watching cartoons on tv. Powerpuff Girls is one of her favorite shows on Cartoon Network. When we were in Cebu, she insisted on buying a pink backpack with a Powerpuff Girls design. At the daycare, she has formed a sort of alliance with two other girls and called themselves the Powerpuff Girls of the Yuri class. Aya is Bubbles, Natsumi-chan is Blossom, and Niku-chan is Buttercup. I myself grew up watching Scooby-Doo and other Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and while the storylines aren’t probably not any different from the cartoons of today, but in my opinion, they are at least better drawn. The Powerpuff Girls are outrageously eerie-looking. Consider this: They have saucer-shaped eyes, which occupy at least half their faces, and get this, they DON’T have any fingers or toes! Gaaah!

If only we could have a little bit of Chemical X to perk up our boring personalities.

Aya loves those weird-looking gals nonetheless. Actually, come to think of it, once you get used to the weirdness, the plots are actually quite engaging. Even the dialogues contain enough sarcasm to appease the more mature audience. Anyway, one day Aya brought home one of her doodles from the daycare. It was a bottle with an “X” on it. When I asked her about it, she shrugged and said a matter-of-factly, “Chemical X.” Of course. What else could it be? 😛

For those who are worried that maybe all that Aya has learned of late are just cartoons and tv, no – there is absolutely no reason for concern. For your information, Aya is steadily working on developing her writing skills. She has already learned to write many letters of the alphabet. And she can already read three-letter words like “car,” “mat,” etc. For the past few weeks we have been making progress with the workbook for preschoolers. On every task she finishes, she insists on getting a 100% mark – and don’t you dare not give it to her because she knows that she deserves it for a job well done! Now that’s our Ayapuffgirl! 😀

A, B, C?, D?, E, F, H – ok she missed G there. But what the heck is PbE “(heart) loves” AYA? Aya said that the block thing at the bottom is chocolate. Mmm. Makes you wonder what a four-year old is thinking about hearts and chocolates.

Aya came home one day and excitedly recited to us the following:

Jugemu-jugemu
Gokōnosurikire
Kaijarisuigyo-no Suigyōmatsu
Unraimatsu Fūraimatsu
Kūnerutokoroni-sumutokoro
Yaburakōjino-burakōji
Paipopaipo-paiponoshūringan
Shūringanno-gūrindai :Gūrindaino-ponpokopīno-ponpokonāno
Chōkyūmeino-chōsuke
寿限無寿限無
五劫の擦り切れ
海砂利水魚の　水行末
雲来末　風来末
食う寝る処に住む処
やぶら小路のぶら小路
パイポパイポ　パイポのシューリンガン
シューリンガンのグーリンダイ
グーリンダイのポンポコピーのポンポコナーの
長久命の長助

I’ve heard of the “Jugemu” being chanted on NHK’s program, “Nihonggo de Asobo,” a children-oriented program that aims to introduce the young viewers to the rich (ok, exotic) world of the Japanese language. The chant is so long and usually spoken very fast, that I find it rather difficult to memorize. Well, maybe except for the “ponpokopino, ponpokonano” bit. It sort of glides on the mouth. The weird thing is that the whole chant doesn’t really make any sense. Aya just memorized the words without paying any attention to the meaning. Does “supercalifragilistic expialidocious” mean anything? But then, it’s not even that long compared to “Jugemu.”

According to the story, Jugemu blah-blah-blah was actually a name given to a boy by a father who consulted a priest about names. The father ended up combining all the names in the list given to him by the priest. By the way, aren’t Thais also famous for using rather long names?

The thing is, Aya has already mastered this seemingly tongue-twister and would happily demonstrate it to anyone who cared to listen. Man, she’s only four years old, and she’s spewing Japanese at us like it was her mother tongue. Well, she actually started talking at a relatively early age. Oh, did I forget to mention that she also speaks Tagalog fluently? We are currently teaching her to speak English, and thanks to her Tita Lai (who takes care of exposing her to American twang), Aya is now also speaking English, with an American twang to boot :). No, she is not confused about these languages at all. Children are much more flexible, and arguably better at learning languages than adults!

On a fun note, in the meantime I’m trying to memorize the whole Jugemu bit so I can show off that I can chant as fast as the kids do. Gambarimasu.