Happy Early Birthday

Yesterday we celebrated Jerans birthday several days early. He will probably have a pretty lame real birthday this year because it's (finally) qualifying exam week! Jeran has been studying all the material from his classes of the last year to prepare for the Masters qualifying exams, which are given between years one and two. The first six hour exam is on Tuesday and the second is on Friday. We are all sooooo ready to be done with the studying for a few weeks until school starts mid-August. Allison and I just try to stay out of his way so he can study study study, which can be pretty boring in a small house

Anyways, good luck to Jeran and the other students this week!

A quick run down of things going on for us right now besides that:

Allison and I need to find new health insurance in the next two weeks.  Ugh.

I'm managing a few projects that need to be completed by Monday but still have lots of work to be done. I think we've got sobe good developers working on them so I'm not to worried (yet) but I may end up working a good amount this weekend when Jeran will finally be free to go have fun.

We're starting to make plans for a graduation (last one!) trip for next spring.

We're getting excited for Mary to come visit us!

And some Allison updates:

She loves grabbing her toes now. She has a hard time getting them to get mouth - either she's too long or she got her mom's flexibility, or both.

Her legs are good at crawling but she doesn't lift herself up with her arms so she scoots forward face-down, leaving a trail of drool like a slug.

She went through a period of crying every time we drove somewhere, but now she sits and quietly looks around or makes quiet little sounds. The crying in the car was getting very old so this is a wonderful turn of events.

Dr. Stratford!

Last Thursday was a very important day in our household. After many long years of dedicated work, Jeran defended his doctoral dissertation! He did such a fantastic job! He got the dissertation turned in a week or two ago and had only about a week to create his PowerPoint presentation and rehearse it. Considering he had mounds of data and information that he has collected and knows, he did an amazing job keeping it short and understandable while still relaying the full message of his project, which dealt with understanding the underlying biology and mechanisms of pancreatic cancer.

(thanks to Bryan for pictures at the defense)

Presenting Dr. Stratford!*

*But don't call him that - he'll probably get mad or at least roll his eyes. As we like to say, he's "not the kind of doctor that helps people".

Jeran's mom came out to be here on the big day. Hooray! His presentation was really quite exceptional and I wish everyone could have been here. His labmates threw a very thoughtful and awesome party afterwards, including some of Jeran's favorite foods and his typical lunch foods too. Jeran requested the US-Belgium game be playing at the party also since he had missed watching it and several other World Cup games to prepare.

We later went and wandered around Duke Gardens.

Jan and Jeran at Duke Gardens

This log had 5 turtles on it sunning themselves! Another nearby had two or three on it. Some of them were moving around, displacing each other, and it was very entertaining to watch.

The Future

Many of you that we have talked to in person already know this, but we finally have definite plans for what Jeran will do after he receives his PhD this summer.

Jeran's PhD defense is set for July 3 and we are VERY ready for it to come. Or at least I am very ready and Jeran is very stressed and busy getting ready for it to come. He has to submit his dissertation a few weeks in advance and also prepare a presentation. He also needs to submit a paper for publishing by then, but luckily that is part of the dissertation, not a completely separate thing.

So after the defense, he will have a week or two to finish making any adjustments and finalize things (I'm not really clear on what this entails, thus the vagueness, but he said he would need this time to finish work), and then several weeks off before he starts a Masters in Biostatistics at UNC-Chapel Hill. Hooray!

At least I think it will be "hooray" and not "groan". He would like to go more in the analysis direction so this should help him get there and give him training that would make his skills more broadly marketable. We are excited for the change in pace this will bring and are curious what going back to being a full-time regular student will be like after so long. And really anything would be better than what he is doing now because he is so burned out on his work and not thrilled with how his PhD career has gone.

It is a two year program, with some chance of being able to finish a semester early, but we aren't counting on that. Jeran will likely do an internship, teaching or research assistanceship, or part time job to make some money and gain applicable experience and network with useful contacts already in the field.

We will not have to move, although our intention is to gradually make some repairs to our house and then put it on the market next summer or so, so we won't be in a big rush to take any offer we get. Then if it did sell we would rent somewhere (which would also be weird to go back to).

In some ways, I've wanted to move for a while because we've had so many friends move away from us and we've long anticipated Jeran finishing his PhD and then needing to move, so not moving seems weird, but I think the change in his schooling will provide enough of a change of pace to satisfy me right now. And a Masters won't drag out indefinitely like a PhD can. It will be hard whenever we do move away because we have really liked the area we are in and our ward, although it goes through huge transition periods, is pretty much the nicest, friendliest church ward of mostly people in very similar circumstances to us. And the weather here is pretty awesome.

Anyways, we are both excited for this small but major change.

30 Days: Day 11

Day 11: Another picture of you and your friends

Michelle, me and Bethany in Mr. Litizzette's classroom. Ahhh, good times.

Published

I forgot to post when this happened, but last month, Jeran was first author on a paper! "A Six-Gene Signature Predicts Survival of Patients with Localized Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma" was published in PloS Medicine in July. Hooray for Stratford JK et al.!

Strategies of Academic Success

I was thinking back on my college days and trying to decide what general tips I would give to students both in college and high school. I came up with a few pretty simple and easy ones that I think made a difference for me:

Make a Semester Calendar. Create a one page calendar covering the entire semester. Write down important dates (tests, due dates, holidays, etc) in a different color for each class so you can see at an instant what you have going on. I usually kept mine in the clear front of a binder or else as the first sheet.

Use white-out strips. It got so much easier to make assignments look good and stay neat when I had white-out strips - you know, the kind that are in a little roll on dispenser. If you make a mistake, instead of scribbling something out or starting over, simply white it out and write over it. It makes life so easy!

Make copies. If you use your book in class but you don't like to carry it, make copies of the relevant parts. For example, I copied all the math problem sections from the end of the chapters and never carried my book to class again!

Make flashcards. My preferred study method was to cut a bunch of papers into 8-12 pieces and write all the terms and things I needed to memorize on them. This method forces you to re-read your notes to find the important info, condense that info into memorizable tidbits, and then re-write the tidbits on the cards. By the time you actually get around to studying the cards, you've already done half the work of studying by just making them! And they are super portable - bonus!

Use the book. Skim through or even (dare I say it?!) read the chapter you will be discussing in class before you go. Simply familiarizing yourself by taking a few notes or highlighting section headings, keywords, etc. can make more of a difference than you expect. The exception to this is Math. In my opinion those books are for getting the math problems from only.

Get to sleep! For most people there is really no very good reason to stay up past 11:00 pm more than once or twice a week. It will make a big difference in how you feel the next day and will help you do better in class. It is said that having 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep is essential to improving and solidifying a task you learned or worked on that day. You can do it!

Well, that's it. Good luck to all you students. As you all know, I'm fuuuull of good advice if you ever need some. :)