We Did It, Lord!

It's been donkey years since I've last updated this blog. This flower needs some watering cos' its withering on the vine!! Fortunately, the current blog entry is upbeat and sanguine. That should do the magical trick of reviving it ;)

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Many of the entries in this blog describe my long and arduous journey of trying to get into the PhD program. I'm glad to say that I've finally made it, and I've received so much more than I expected. By God's grace, I've got my first paper published in a relatively good journal and have been admitted to one of the best marketing programs in the world. After three years of applications, self-doubt and feelings of dejection, I've finally made it (We did it, Lord!). I'll be starting my semester at Columbia University in New York this Fall.

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Although I didn't set out to do a PhD in marketing when I first set foot in the United States, things unravelled and somehow I was challenged to become an experimenter (something I never thought I could carve a livelihood out of since I've always considered myself to be a pretty well-manufactured product of the Singapore education system--conventional and uncreative). Regardless, I'm anything but divorcing myself from the field of psychology (as many would be mistaken); I'm just migrating from one branch, clinical psychology, to another, consumer psychology. An excerpt from my personal statement should serve to enlighten:

Sigmund Freud had once remarked that, “It is the mundane themes of everyday life that give us the inner workings of the mind”. Immense skepticism toward his speculative theories and fancy guesswork aside, I hold no reservations in concurring with this simple yet insightful statement. Indeed, it is the run-of-the-mill processes like forming judgments of our co-worker or neighbor, or making decisions even as trifling as deciding which dishwashing detergent to purchase, that seem to expose the intricacies of our minds to psychologists who strive to understand and predict human behavior. As Freud departed from explicating the irrational presentations of neuroses to fashioning hypotheses about the average human mind, I have resolved to retire from clinical psychology and to instead home in on the basic mechanisms underlying typical thoughts and responses. How people harness inputs of emotion and motivation to function within the boundaries of rationality is what I reckon more intriguing and thought provoking.

Moving from the world of correlational and predictable clin psych research to the volatile territory of ANOVAs and cutting-edge consumer/social psych research is definitely not going to be easy breezy for me. Nonetheless, it's going to be exciting and it's going to be fun! :)

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Things I'm looking forward to:

1. Finally having my own office cubicle in the business school (I don't have to work in the library or rely on their 20-page free printing quota to do my printing!);
2. Not having to explain that I'm from Teachers College which is an affiliate of Columbia University and not Columbia University (I won't feel like an impostor Columbia student anymore!);
3. Receiving a stipend after not having had a monthly salary since May 2008;
4. Having key access to the restrooms on the 5th floor (marketing program) and not having to run all the way down to the first floor when I need to go;
5. I don't need to feel like a chao RA anymore!

Yay!