I returned from my exotic tour of Southeast Asia (including Cambodia, Malaysia, India, and Nepal) about 2 weeks ago. It was AWESOME, except for the foul tropical disease I picked up in Gaya, Bihar. Still good, though. What an effective way to lose a lot of weight.

I put up pictures from the trip in this Picasa album. Sorry, you’ll need permission to see them. Some other pictures are below. Hover for descriptions.

My favorite part? The religious pilgrimage sites we visited, actually, including Bodhgaya, the site of the Mahabodhi Temple and Bodhi tree under which Buddha reached enlightenment in 632 BC, and Varanasi, the widest spot of River Ganga and holiest site for Hindus. It was incredible to see Buddhists from around the world meditating at the Mahabodhi Temple, and Hindus bathing in the holy water of River Ganga. Very inspiring.

I love traveling. I wonder where my next destination will be!

I wanted to make a new website before starting graduate school. So first I went about stalking far too many MIT, Stanford, Princeton, & CMU computer science Ph.D. students’ websites to get an idea of what to include. After getting thoroughly overwhelmed by how ridiculously impressive some of these students are, I realized I didn’t want my page to be strictly a dry, professional, overly-organized “school” site, anyway. This is my “personal” website, too, so I think it’s allowed to be fun and include some frivolous details. So here is the first (nearly) complete draft.

What I like:

• Layout of my home page
• Hover effect of the contact buttons on my home page (doesn’t work right in IE, and if you’re using IE, you need to get a real web browser)
• The VROOOOOM!!! effect when you click on the navigation links on my CV page… Yay!
• The expandable drop-down details on my CV page

To work on:

• The top navigation bar on my CV (and blog) page is miserably ugly and poorly organized.
• Is it too dark? Do the colors work? Is the background too busy?
• Does it take too long to load?
• Do you like the fonts? My title font, Raleway, is rendering funny on the iPhone and iPad… =/ The version with Josefin Sans, a font that does look right on the iPad, but which I don’t like as much, can be seen on this sample page. Thoughts?? I’m also using Didact Gothic and Century Gothic.
• Is the layout clear and intuitive, or confusing?
• Am I missing something?

Help me?! I’d really appreciate your comments/suggestions (preferably via email) !

Visiting graduate schools last month was a ton of fun! Of course, I’m now a few weeks behind in all my schoolwork, and senioritis is hitting hard… I keep telling myself that I do need to get my Bachelor’s degrees before starting my Ph.D. of course. I narrowed my grad school options down to the University of Washington in Seattle, and Princeton University. It was an incredibly close call between the two.

March 15-16, University of Washington: I had an unbelievable time visiting UW and Seattle. The department was huge, and professors and current students are doing amazing research. I thought the computer science graduate students were fun and social, and there seemed to be tons to do in the city. And the rain was not that bad.

The computational biology perspectives got to go on a boat tour of Lake Union on Wednesday the 16th.

March 20-21, Princeton University: I thought the campus was beautiful, and the town of Princeton was quaint and cute. However, flying into Newark and taking the NJ transit to Princeton gave me a good look at the state of New Jersey… =/. I thought the Princeton professors were equally as fun as the UW professors, and I think I was personally more interested in their ongoing research, but that’s tough to say. However, there was obviously not nearly as much to do in and around the area as there was in Seattle, and the department and school itself was significantly smaller. Definitely a huge change from the Boston area, where I’ve been for the past four years.

So how did I decide? Princeton had one single pro over the University of Washington, which turned out to be the deciding factor. Being at Princeton and talking to the professors and other students somehow reminded me exactly what I liked about biology and computer science in the first place. I had that “Oh yeah, that’s right. I remember why I love studying this so much.” feeling, that I inexplicably didn’t quite feel at the UW. In the end, this is what made the choice for Princeton feel right.

Looks like I’m going to be at Princeton for the next 5-6 years!

So I’ve been MIA for most of this semester, and a good explanation for that is writing a graduate school personal statement literally drains the soul.

The most annoying aspect of writing a personal statement? Every single person you talk to will give you wildly conflicting advice on what needs to be included in your statement, how you should present your accomplishments, what graduate school admissions committees are looking for, and what facts are important. There is no consistency whatsoever.

On the one hand…	But on the other…
“You need to include all of your past research. What you did, who you worked with, what results you got. Be specific and include details.”	“Only include relevant research experience; don’t just reiterate your resumé. We want to know what you learned and how it relates to what you want to do now.”
“Talk about what skills you have. How will these skills help you to conduct Ph.D. level research?”	“Don’t talk about your skills. That’s not what your personal statement is for. Committees will look to your recommendation letters to figure out what skills you have.”
“Everyone applying for a Ph.D. in computer science obviously likes computer science, so don’t include that. It’s unoriginal. Talk about why you’re better than the rest and what sets you apart.”	“The committee is mostly interested in why you like computer science. Be modest.”
“Talk about your career goals and how getting a Ph.D. will enable you to reach these goals.”	“Simply wanting to be a professor means nothing if you can’t do research. That’s what graduate school is about. Talk about your capacity to conduct research and don’t include this extra irrelevant career stuff.”
“A lot of students don’t actually complete their Ph.D., so to prove you’re not a high risk applicant, say specifically what research you want to do, even if you’re unsure.”	“It’s okay to be unsure about your research area. Simply saying what broad areas you’re interested in is good enough and won’t tie you down.”
“You need to be competitive. Highlight your impressive accomplishments. Don’t expect anyone to read between the lines – spell out what conclusions you want your reader to make.”	“This isn’t a competitive beauty pageant! Relax.”

After nearly 15 drafts and harsh criticism from about as many people, I finally rewrote my personal statement from scratch in less than an hour one day before my first deadline. I think it was the best version I had written.

I’ve finished submitting all of my applications, and now I’m just waiting to hear back… EEEK fingers crossed. Wish me luck!!

Life since school ended has been quite busy and quite fun. I’ve been traveling a fair amount, and although that’s awesome, I can’t deny that it is also very distracting from the work I am supposed to be doing. I’m finishing up the project I have been working on this past semester to add a sequence alignment step to the Matt structural aligner, and there is literally nothing more frustrating than running into time-consuming bugs at the very last moment. I can’t think of anything I want more than to get everything working and finished within the next few days.

A recap of some of my fun destinations, so far, though:

June 2-4: Montréal, QC for my sister Maya’s graduation from McGill University

Photo Courtesy of Maya Nadimpalli Congrats grad!	Photo Courtesy of Maya Nadimpalli My sister and me at McGill	Photo Courtesy of Maya Nadimpalli Excellent family shot at the party

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June 23-26: San Francisco & Mountain View, CA for the 2010 Google Scholars retreat

Angela Oguna, Anne Neilsen, Nancy Douyon, and me by the piers in San Fran	At the Googleplex in Mountain View!	Photo Courtesy of Brandon D. Fields Group shot of Google Scholars out to dinner in the city

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July 2-5: Washington, DC for Independence Day

Photo Courtesy of Michelle Liu All of us outside the Nats stadium for the July 4th DC Nationals vs. NY Mets baseball game	Photo Courtesy of Bianca Velayo Bianca Velayo and Sanjay Misra in front of the Washington Monument	Photo Courtesy of Michelle Liu Fireworks on the mall!

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July 7-13: Boston, MA for the ISMB conference!

Steven Brenner’s keynote speech on Sunday, July 11th	Dan Malmer and me (volunteers from Tufts) on the last day of ISMB

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July 15-August 10: INDIA for vacation
I’ll also be leaving for India soon, where my family and I will be sight-seeing Kashmir (exciting!) along with seeing family. Should be awesome! Wish me luck getting everything finished that I need to before that happens… :/

First of all, it’s a shame that I have “text-transform: lowercase;” for my heading so you can’t see that WICKED EXCITED is in all caps. But! Several fun things have happened recently that have caused me to be ecstatically, unbelievably happy, so I wanted to share.

1. I found out yesterday that I am a recipient of the 2010 Google’s Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship for women in computer science!!! I legitimately am still grinning idiotically. Super awesome. The award is $10k toward school next year (good thing…since apparently 3 years at Tufts has actually completely depleted my college fund), and I get to go to a fun retreat at the end of June to tour Google’s headquarters! WICKED AWESOME!!!! (Check out the Google blog post about it or read the Tufts CS Department’s news article!)

   Update on November 15, 2010: I was interviewed at the Grace Hopper Celebration in September about the Anita Borg Scholarship!

2. I didn’t apply for this one, but I was nominated for and won Tufts’ Audrey Butvay Gruss Science Award this year. The award is $2.5k for an undergraduate who has shown outstanding academic achievement in any of the sciences. Winning this was a complete surprise and I’m still pretty pumped. So far I’ve put the money toward fun dinners in Harvard Square to hang out with friends and enjoy life, and this money’ll help me pay rent this summer, woo hoo!
3. So I was supposed to go to the CCSC: Central Plains conference a few weekends ago to present my webpage in Kansas City since I was selected as a finalist for the student webpage competition, but unfortunately my flight was delayed, meaning I’d miss my connection, and therefore the entire day was messed up. I got super stressed and upset while at Logan Airport, and I thoroughly harassed the conference coordinators to see if I could move my presentation to later in the day (I’m talking voicemails on the office phone, emails, even called the hotel they were staying at and left a message with the receptionist…). I didn’t hear back in time, though, and therefore ended up not going. I did, however, win the award for Best Visual Design anyway, which is awesome.

I’m pumped. I really want to thank everyone who’s made this possible… my professors & recommendation writers, my friends, my peers at Tufts, my parents (especially my mom, who convinced me to apply to #1 and #3 in the first place). Really. I owe all my successes to them – no question. Times like these just make me so thankful for all the opportunities I’ve been given and for those in my life who help and inspire me to be the best I can be.

I finally finished registering for classes for next semester (ah senior fall already!). I got into everything I wanted, including Sociology of Relgion, which I ended up dropping. My schedule now looks like:

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
10:30-11:45		Math54: Abstract Linear Algebra		Math54: Abstract Linear Algebra
12:00-1:15		Bio188: Seminar in Mol. Bio & Genetics		Bio188: Seminar in Mol. Bio & Genetics
1:30-2:45		Pe7B: Advanced Power Yoga		Pe7B: Advanced Power Yoga
4:30-5:45		Comp20: Web Programming		Comp20: Web Programming
6:30-9:00				Comp150: Protein Bioinformatics
	Comp197: Senior Honors Thesis

I wasted time by making schedules for my friends too. We’re all taking Advanced Power Yoga together, yikes. Chances that that class will murder me? 100%.

I’m enrolled in an Adobe Photoshop class this semester at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I took this class mostly for fun and mainly because I’ve wanted to learn Photoshop forever, but I just never find the time to do it.

I just spent ~4 hours on this most recent assignment, which was to create an image of some myth, legend, or story in any religion. I chose the story of River Ganga from Hindu mythology. Long (and awesome, so go find and read it) story short, Ganga (a goddess and river in heaven) was forced down from heaven to earth. Although the whole world bloomed, Ganga was miserable: imprisoned in Lord Shiva’s hair, exiled from the heavens, and forced onto earth. This picture didn’t really come out as I had intended. I wanted everything but Ganga to look happy and mystical, but I think it just looks childish as of now. Eh. Here’s Draft 1:

NOTE: It’s hilarious that the face in the waterfall is me. I think that’s super pretentious. It wasn’t my idea; the rest of the class voted on it. I originally had Aishwarya Rai as Ganga.

So my friend James and I went to San Francisco for spring break this year. It was awesome. We did so many things in a week that I don’t even want to try to list them all here. You can check out my Picasa album to see some pictures, though.

I had a ton of fun the entire week, and also importantly, I really liked the city of San Francisco. I’ve spent time in LA, DC, NYC, ATL… and yet I would never choose to live in any of those places. Boston has forever been my #1, and finally I’ve found another city that I would absolutely consider living in after graduation. Highlights of the trip? Here’s one – the ice cream shop at Ghirardelli Square:

And the second – our night cruise to Alcatraz Island. We watched the sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge, then got to see the city lit up at night. Totally awesome.

 

Would I go back? Absolutely. I ♥ SF!

I had lunch with one of my professors on Friday, and he asked me what I like to do outside of academics. I thought about it for a while. I’m not seriously involved in outside clubs, activities, sports, or causes. I volunteer a bit, but do I really love it? I don’t know. I know I love what I study and the research that I do, and I used to think that should be enough, but maybe not. So what’s my hobby?

Finally I decided that I really like designing / formatting / organizing / making things look nice. I’m nowhere near good enough to do it professionally, but I do enjoy it. My iTunes library is pristine (all 7000+ songs fully labeled with album art); my pictures and class notes are organized by date and event or topic. I made this website from scratch (no templates or Dreamweaver or anything like that – just Notepad++ and a book on HTML). I like making posters (1,2), and I thoroughly enjoyed a course by Edward Tufte on visualization last semester. And! I love fixing resumés.

A note on that, though. I pronounce “resumé” like REH-zoo-may (NOT reh-zoom or RAY-soo-may). Merriam-Webster says it can be spelled resume, resumé, or résumé. I understand that the word was originally French and came from résumer (to summarize or sum up), but I’m not French, nor do I pronounce the word RAY-soo-may, so why would I spell it résumé? Therefore, I’m sticking with resumé, even if Microsoft Word and countless other internet sources try to correct me.

Just two days ago, I remade my resumé and a few of my friends’ for fun and to procrastinate from writing an essay. The JPGs are below. I think I like #3 the most.