We've wined, we've waited, now it's time to celebrate 2016

[hippyscientist]

Just now, Neist said:

What day of the week will you show up? DMV busy-ness varies greatly by city, but I'd avoid any DMV on Saturday, if possible. 

Besides, State College isn't too huge. It might not be very crowded. I find DMVs (at least in the US) to be similar Post Offices, the bigger the city, the more unpleasant they become.

Yeah my experiences of the DMV include one in NYC and one in San Diego so probably not the best introductions! I'll be going in the week as soon as I can - I'd never go at the weekend if I can help it! 

[MarineBluePsy]

On 5/10/2016 at 11:28 PM, hippyscientist said:

All this talk of moving. I'm excited to get into my apartment but the thought of moving all my stuff, with my dad, just, no. I'm kinda regretting asking him to move me in a funny way. If I was going on my own I could pretend that it was just another travelling adventure, instead I've got dad who will be questioning decisions that I make, remarking on how expensive (or not) things I buy are and be fairly emotional. This is the first time I've felt even slightly apprehensive about moving. I don't like it. Bring back the excited about everything feelings!

I'm having the opposite issue and am totally irritated over not having any help moving.  I'm not traveling with furniture, but still.  I've just grown fed up with having to do everything by myself.

On 5/10/2016 at 9:21 AM, Pink Fuzzy Bunny said:

I didn't feel excited to move before I did so... I was just sad to leave my old apartment as well as my friends/family/professors in Illinois. Getting in the car to leave was hard. I didn't get excited until I was about 12 hours into my 14-hour drive to New York. And if you were excited before, just wait until you touch down on the tarmac in the US!! 

Yes leaving my old apartment was sad too!  I'm crashing with an acquaintance until its time to move, but I'd lived in my apartment for like 5 years and it was the only place I'd fully unpacked in ever in my life.  I'm hoping to recreate that by finding the perfect place and staying there for the duration of my PhD.  

[gingin6789]

Hi, all! *plops down in thread and rolls about*

it's been a while since I've been here! Blargh!

Semester is finally coming to a close. Thesis is finished. Students take their final exam on the 17th. I walk at graduation on the 23rd.

I've been so fortunate and am honored to have received a Research Assistantship at the University of Delaware that begins this summer. I'll be interviewing women and providers about their experiences with contraception and reproduction, so this is right up my alley in terms of research interests. I'm very excited, and again, just so thrilled and flattered to have been offered this position before I've even started attending their PhD program!!

I probably won't be as active on grad cafe. I've met so many wonderful friends on here!! 

Please, follow me on on instagram, or Private Message me for my facebook name. I would love to keep in touch with you all. My instagram is public: gingin6789 (totally surprising username, I know).

[Neist]

14 minutes ago, gingin6789 said:

I've been so fortunate and am honored to have received a Research Assistantship at the University of Delaware that begins this summer. I'll be interviewing women and providers about their experiences with contraception and reproduction, so this is right up my alley in terms of research interests. I'm very excited, and again, just so thrilled and flattered to have been offered this position before I've even started attending their PhD program!!

I probably won't be as active on grad cafe. I've met so many wonderful friends on here!!

Congrats! And howdy! Sounds like a great opportunity.  

As per Grad Cafe, it's already died down considerably, but I'm sure some of us will stick around. You should drop by again sometime. I'd add you on social media, but I'm too lazy to use them. I should fix that.

[hippyscientist]

17 minutes ago, gingin6789 said:

Hi, all! *plops down in thread and rolls about*

it's been a while since I've been here! Blargh!

Semester is finally coming to a close. Thesis is finished. Students take their final exam on the 17th. I walk at graduation on the 23rd.

I've been so fortunate and am honored to have received a Research Assistantship at the University of Delaware that begins this summer. I'll be interviewing women and providers about their experiences with contraception and reproduction, so this is right up my alley in terms of research interests. I'm very excited, and again, just so thrilled and flattered to have been offered this position before I've even started attending their PhD program!!

I probably won't be as active on grad cafe. I've met so many wonderful friends on here!! 

Please, follow me on on instagram, or Private Message me for my facebook name. I would love to keep in touch with you all. My instagram is public: gingin6789 (totally surprising username, I know).

Yay! So many of us in the NE. My instagram is public too - PM me if anyone wants it.

I'll be hanging around here but probably less active from July. I do think of most of you in this thread as friends! 

[Danger_Zone]

@Neist I don't have any sort of social media either. I used to have Facebook but it was just full of drama and high school people I wanted to forget about. But I'm thinking of getting something (maybe Facebook again? I'm not sure) to keep in touch with family and friends when I move away, as well as people I will meet at school.

@gingin6789 Congrats, I hope you enjoy yourself! That sounds like a really great topic you'll be working on.

[Pink Fuzzy Bunny]

Congrats @gingin6789!! 

[ihatechoosingusernames]

9 hours ago, Levon3 said:

You can open a bank account before you get here. I did that on ally.com, then just changed my address once I had a US address. Online banks also tend to have lower fees.

Ally also has some of the best interest rates on savings accounts! I love that bank  

[Pink Fuzzy Bunny]

Wow, I had never heard of Ally. But 1% APY? Wow!!

Call me old-fashioned but I don't know how I feel about having an entirely online bank though honestly... 

[Neist]

Anyone a little overwhelmed with getting their digital life organized before graduate school?

I've spent the last several hours organizing my email and cloud storage. Ugh. This is going to be rough.

[Pink Fuzzy Bunny]

35 minutes ago, Neist said:

Anyone a little overwhelmed with getting their digital life organized before graduate school?

I've spent the last several hours organizing my email and cloud storage. Ugh. This is going to be rough.

I still haven't taken the leap and moved my entire Google Drive into a folder called "Undergrad"... I wish that I could save all of my emails from my university's email.

 

[Neist]

3 minutes ago, Pink Fuzzy Bunny said:

I still haven't taken the leap and moved my entire Google Drive into a folder called "Undergrad"... I wish that I could save all of my emails from my university's email.

You can, actually, if you use Gmail.

If you setup Gmail to receive your university email inside of Gmail, it'll import the entirety of your emails in. Or at least it did for me. Thousands and thousands of them. Took days for the process to complete.

Edited May 12, 2016 by Neist

[Pink Fuzzy Bunny]

1 hour ago, Neist said:

You can, actually, if you use Gmail.

If you setup Gmail to receive your university email inside of Gmail, it'll import the entirety of your emails in. Or at least it did for me. Thousands and thousands of them. Took days for the process to complete.

Unfortunately my university email doesn't support exporting... and since it's through Outlook (sort of), I don't think I can access it through Gmail

[hippyscientist]

For storage, I have two external hard drives. One is for my music and movie library, suitably named my entertainment drive. The other is for work that I don't need easy access to any more - it has all my undergrad stuff on, and most of my MSc stuff now. That way I can access it if I need to but I don't take up space on my laptop and clouds. They are both kept safe somewhere! Then my dropbox, google drive and laptop have all my current stuff on. It means I know where everything is at any one point. 

Emails: I sat down and just manually went through. So many junk, important at the time but no longer needed emails. Of course you keep the nice ones but I copied and pasted them into a document (I don't get many nice ones....). To be fair, all my university accounts are for dealing with admin-y stuff, stuff needed for that degree and that's about it. I have my professional account tied to just me for errything else. 

I've had a really weird day. Partially it's been awesome. My research has been really productive and I feel happy taking tomorrow off to go to this fitness convention guilt free. But then it's also been really awful because I got some bad news about a very good friend. I just want to go give him a hug but he's in Australia and its a bit far to go for a hug.  

[Neist]

10 hours ago, Pink Fuzzy Bunny said:

Unfortunately my university email doesn't support exporting... and since it's through Outlook (sort of), I don't think I can access it through Gmail

You don't export it, really. I didn't think it would work this way when I set it up, but when you add an email to "Check mail from other accounts (using POP3):" in your Gmail settings, it imported all of my Outlook email in. Our university uses an exchange server (now the Outlook Web App). It was a bit annoying, as I now have to sort through the 4000 or so emails that got pulled over, but it worked.  

You might try it!

10 minutes ago, hippyscientist said:

For storage, I have two external hard drives. One is for my music and movie library, suitably named my entertainment drive. The other is for work that I don't need easy access to any more - it has all my undergrad stuff on, and most of my MSc stuff now. That way I can access it if I need to but I don't take up space on my laptop and clouds. They are both kept safe somewhere! Then my dropbox, google drive and laptop have all my current stuff on. It means I know where everything is at any one point. 

Emails: I sat down and just manually went through. So many junk, important at the time but no longer needed emails. Of course you keep the nice ones but I copied and pasted them into a document (I don't get many nice ones....). To be fair, all my university accounts are for dealing with admin-y stuff, stuff needed for that degree and that's about it. I have my professional account tied to just me for errything else. 

I've had a really weird day. Partially it's been awesome. My research has been really productive and I feel happy taking tomorrow off to go to this fitness convention guilt free. But then it's also been really awful because I got some bad news about a very good friend. I just want to go give him a hug but he's in Australia and its a bit far to go for a hug.  

I've pretty much moved everything to the cloud. I'm nearing my space limit, but I'm considering buying a cheapo Chromebook in order to upgrade storage capacity (a lot of Chromebooks offer a few years of decent storage). It's a pretty good deal, I think. And my email are similar to yours. I have 10 years of employment emails that will need to be trashed. I doubt I'm going to need to go back and check any minutiae of the day-to-day goings on once I leave. Or at least I hope I won't need to. 

Also, sorry to hear about your friend.  

[MarineBluePsy]

14 hours ago, Pink Fuzzy Bunny said:

Wow, I had never heard of Ally. But 1% APY? Wow!!

Call me old-fashioned but I don't know how I feel about having an entirely online bank though honestly... 

I'm with you on this one and wouldn't do it for my primary account.  I have set up an online only savings account at Barclays that so far I'm liking.  My big challenge with savings is having easy access to those funds for impulse buys so it helps that there's a few days delay in transferring funds.

13 hours ago, Neist said:

Anyone a little overwhelmed with getting their digital life organized before graduate school?

I've spent the last several hours organizing my email and cloud storage. Ugh. This is going to be rough.

Ugh don't remind me!  I need to back up everything, delete old crap, and consolidate a few things.  Then of course I need to get one of those external hard drives because I have read way too many horror stories about grad students that didn't back up and lost their entire dissertation.

@gingin6789  Glad to hear everything is going so well!  Your research sounds quite interesting.  I'm always keeping my eyes peeled for new research on women's reproductive health.

[Pink Fuzzy Bunny]

@Neist I got most of my emails switched over using your advice. Thanks a bunch  Although Google is still being stubborn on the last ~2000 emails, but that's a bug from what I can tell.

In other news, I really need to start working next Monday so I can stop buying things for my new apartment. I just bought a bird feeder... 

[Neist]

28 minutes ago, Pink Fuzzy Bunny said:

@Neist I got most of my emails switched over using your advice. Thanks a bunch  Although Google is still being stubborn on the last ~2000 emails, but that's a bug from what I can tell.

In other news, I really need to start working next Monday so I can stop buying things for my new apartment. I just bought a bird feeder... 

They'll pop up, eventually. They seemed to have appeared in batches for me. It probably took three days for the entire process to complete with approximately 4000-5000 emails.

Keep hope!

[Pink Fuzzy Bunny]

1 minute ago, Neist said:

They'll pop up, eventually. They seemed to have appeared in batches for me. It probably took three days for the entire process to complete with approximately 4000-5000 emails.

Keep hope!

Okay, that's good to know! Thanks  

[Neist]

5 hours ago, MarineBluePsy said:

Ugh don't remind me!  I need to back up everything, delete old crap, and consolidate a few things.  Then of course I need to get one of those external hard drives because I have read way too many horror stories about grad students that didn't back up and lost their entire dissertation.

I'd even be leery of exclusively using external HDDs, unless you used them in a RAID, for redundancy's sake.

You might check to see if there's any programs out there that will periodically upload backups to cloud storage. I know there's services that provide this at a cost, but surely someone has developed something that will daily update the contents of a folder, right? That almost has to exist.

[Pink Fuzzy Bunny]

16 minutes ago, Neist said:

I'd even be leery of exclusively using external HDDs, unless you used them in a RAID, for redundancy's sake.

You might check to see if there's any programs out there that will periodically upload backups to cloud storage. I know there's services that provide this at a cost, but surely someone has developed something that will daily update the contents of a folder, right? That almost has to exist.

Maybe use Google Drive? If you have it on your computer, it automatically syncs folders to the Drive. I use Google Drive for all of my documents, photos, everything... so I can go to work and have it instantly appear in the matching folder on my work computer, and if my computer goes kaput I've lost nothing.

Also, DAMN YOU ILLINOIS. The state is so poor that you can't even mail in your registration to get a new license plate sticker, you have to actually go to the DMV. Which would be great, if I weren't 1000 miles away!

Edited May 12, 2016 by Pink Fuzzy Bunny

[Neist]

5 minutes ago, Pink Fuzzy Bunny said:

Maybe use Google Drive? If you have it on your computer, it automatically syncs folders to the Drive. I use Google Drive for all of my documents, photos, everything... so I can go to work and have it instantly appear in the matching folder on my work computer, and if my computer goes kaput I've lost nothing.

The Google Drive app does that? Some Google nerd I am.  

I avoid the problem entirely and simply work exclusively on Drive.

[Pink Fuzzy Bunny]

17 minutes ago, Neist said:

The Google Drive app does that? Some Google nerd I am.  

I avoid the problem entirely and simply work exclusively on Drive.

Does what? You mean syncing the folder? Yeah, it puts a folder on your machine called "Google Drive" and whatever is in that folder automatically syncs to your Drive. So in my Google Drive folder, for instance, I have a folder for "Classes Spring 2016", and then in that a folder for each class, blah blah blah.

What do you mean you work exclusively on Drive, if it's not that? You use Google Docs and such?

[Neist]

13 minutes ago, Pink Fuzzy Bunny said:

Does what? You mean syncing the folder? Yeah, it puts a folder on your machine called "Google Drive" and whatever is in that folder automatically syncs to your Drive. So in my Google Drive folder, for instance, I have a folder for "Classes Spring 2016", and then in that a folder for each class, blah blah blah.

What do you mean you work exclusively on Drive, if it's not that? You use Google Docs and such?

Yup, I use the web-based tools. I usually have to import my documents back into Word because documents made via Docs often produce errors (e.g., footnotes, margins, paragraph breaks, etc.). However, outside of that one caveat, all of my document storage and production is produced on the web tools. 

I don't even use Adobe Reader on my computers anymore. My default application is Chrome. The less programs I have on my computer the better. It'll run smoother.

[pterosaur]

Did someone say backups? I keep an external hard drive that backs up weekly by USB, keeping my entire home directly and storing versions in case I realize I deleted an essential file a month ago. (My computer could blow up, and I'd install Ubuntu on a new computer, hook this sucker up, and be back up and running in under an hour. It's awesome.) I also keep a backup on Dropbox. And I have a home server set up on my Raspberry Pi, which is running OwnCloud (like a home Dropbox) and a plex media server for all my movies. I currently only use Google Drive to back up photos (I just got a DSLR and I'm getting into photography), and I have unlimited storage for it with my university email account! But I can't really use it for my primary backup since they STILL don't have a Linux client for it. (They've been promising for years...)

As for banks, I went all through undergrad without opening a local account, but I'm looking at being a grown up now. I'm planning to open an account at the university credit union. If your university has one, they tend to have good rates and services and potentially low rates on future loans/mortgages (if you want to really think like a grown up).

In other news, I spent hours today strapped into an exoskeleton programming it for my research experiment. Maybe debugging it while wearing it wasn't the safest idea? But I didn't die. And my supervisor says if things continue going according to plan, I should be able to finish up by the end of July, which is fantastic since I don't technically end until September. Sweeeeeeeeet.