Personal News

1. I’ve decided to not continue with my Ph.D program in economics. Instead, I’ll be taking two more classes, then exiting with my masters. Obviously, this news doesn’t have too much to do with this blog, but it’s been a big change that I’ve been pondering over the past few weeks, which has sapped a bit of my creative energy. I still love, love, love economics, but I’ve decided the academic career is just not suited for my personality, interests, or lifestyle. Instead, I’ll do work that’s grounded in economics, but a bit more “real world”, and enjoy the fact that I won’t have to spend my nights and weekends trying to churn out research to get tenure. Plus: no horrendous job search at the end of five or six years of graduate student poverty.
   Intercultural tidbits: Aditya has been hugely supportive through this whole endeavor – first moving to DC with me so I could attend a Ph.D program, and now being completely cool about the fact that we moved across the country, just to have me quit the program a year later. His family has also been very understanding, even though I think they were looking forward to another daughter-in-law with a Ph.D. But they mostly want what makes me happiest, and understand that the academia wouldn’t. And this way my career is much more portable to India…
2. I’m still doing cool research this summer about India. While I don’t love research enough to do it for a lifetime, I do enjoy it, and I particularly enjoy the part-time job I have doing research with a European economist this summer. Get this: she’s married to a Bengali too! I recognized the golden wedding bangle she was wearing (a Bengali tradition), and asked. And, perhaps not surprisingly, her work has a focus on India. Simply put, the research is on how access to credit markets has affected Indian suicide in the rural areas – basically, when times get tough, and farmers see no way out, they often commit suicide. Access to reasonable lines of credit allow for a way out of the tough times, so you’d expect to see deaths go down as credit access goes up. Right now I’m just scrubbing the data (organizing it and making sure everything is right), but we’ll likely be running some regressions later in the summer to check whether the hypothesis is correct or not.
   Intercultural tidbits: pretty much all of it is intercultural and Indian – I’ve already developed a better “economic intuition” about India as a country by working through all the data.
3. I’ve gotten a great job. Apparently, economics Ph.D dropouts are a desired commodity on the labor job market, at least in the DC area. Despite the lowered economic growth (not yet a recession, though!), I was able to find a job very quickly as an analyst, partially due to a recommendation by a good Bangladeshi friend of ours. I’ll be working as in the field of wholesale power – i.e. energy markets – modeling how energy demands are changing in the United States, and what sort of resources will be needed in the future to meet those demands. It’s a pretty cool job for an economist, since energy is such a vital & dynamic part of any economy, and becoming more so. Plus I get happy feelings from working at a company trying to solve the coming energy problems. I’ll be starting this job this summer, while continuing to work on my research assistantship, and then will take classes part time in the fall to finish my masters. Should be a hectic time!
   Intercultural tidbits: I think I’m one of three or four white people in the (large) department. It feels like I’m back in grad school – or high school!
4. I just got out of the hospital – yesterday. Okay, this is a bit of a downer – and the reason I haven’t been around much this week. I recently developed, um, how did the doctor put it: “whopping big” blood clots in both of my lungs – i.e. pulmonary embolisms. Despite a bit of pain, I was never in any major danger, and I’m doing tons better now. The only downside is that, well, it feels a bit like I’ve transfered my mind into the body of an 80-year-old. I’m a slow-moving, slightly-wheezing, heart-racing lover of naps now. Seriously – I’ll sit down, and then, 15 minutes later, I’m out cold. Wake up an hour late, watch a few minutes of the Discovery Channel – then, whoop, I’m down for the count. It’d be rather amazing if it weren’t happening to me all the time. Luckily, this is a short-term problem, and I’m informed I’ll be back to normal pretty soon. Maybe not in marathon shape – but who are we kidding? It’s not like I was running marathons previously, either.
   Intercultural tidbits: again, Aditya has been amazing through all this: cooking, cleaning up, bringing me water, fluffing the pillows, listening to me whine between naps… His family has also been very concerned, calling several times a day from India to get updates and make sure I’m feeling fine. In fact, they’ve been doing a better job of calling than my own family has! (To be fair, Aditya’s family just talks more on the phone than mine does – and they like to keep in closer contact.)
5. Aditya’s parents are coming for an extended stay. This is pretty exciting news for us. They’ll be here for over two months this summer, which means we’ll have plenty of time to visit, see the sites, go on road trips, and the like. I’ll be writing more about this in the future, but right now Aditya and I are just pleased and busy with planning. We still need to purchase furniture (like, say, a bed) for the guest bedroom, and finish up with all the final unpacking around the house, but I think we’ll be ready by the time they arrive. They’re bringing curtains from India for all of the house’s windows, which is also awesome. I haven’t seen any of them yet, but I’m sure they’ll look great (Maa picked out the saris for my wedding too, so, clearly, she has good taste.)
   Intercultural tidbits: this visit will probably be a goldmine for topics and stories about our intercultural family, so look forward to it. We are!

Blog News

1. Skribit: from time to time I get emails from you guys requesting particular topics for a post. While I love getting those emails, I realize that not everyone has the time or energy (like the current, 80-year-old version of myself) to send off an email. So I’m enabling a widget in the sidebar, called Skribit, to allow you to suggest topics you’d like to see in the future without needing to leave the site. Just click on the “What should I write about?” section, then enter in what you’re interested about. And if someone else has already made a suggestion you’d like to see happen, you can vote it up. Or, you know, vote it down if you’re not too keen on the subject. I promise to listen to the voices of the masses, albeit not immediately. Gotta wait for the creative juices to start flowing (or for the napping to cease).
2. FriendFeed: I’m always finding a lot of interesting content, intercultural and otherwise, out on the internet. If it’s particularly amazing, or I feel the need to comment at length, I’ll write a blog post about it – but if I wrote a blog post for everything I was interested in, I’d be doing nothing but trolling the net and writing on this blog. So instead I’m putting in another widget which will show you the top of my “friend feed”: a list of all the stuff I find interesting enough to share, but not quite blog worthy. If you like something, and want to hear more about it, let me know (in the comments or skribit), and I’ll keep my eye out for similar material.