This is neither my first blog nor my first research journal. My first blog turned out to be more of a burden than a helpful device because it was largely separate from my day-to-day work and therefore the time commitment it demanded detracted from my ability to study and do research. Previous research journals have suffered primarily from media that wasn’t given to flexible organization. It seemed that a choice always had to be made between a strictly linear journal-like approach that made connecting ideas across time difficult, and a dispersed collection of snippets that lacked coherence.
I’m hoping that combining the blog and research journal will help to overcome these issues. The research journal is something I should really do anyway, and the blog format seems like a promising compromise between the linearity of a journal and a dispersed collection of thoughts. On top of that, I thoroughly enjoy communicating my thoughts (when I’ve prepared, I often stumble around quite a lot when caught by surprise).
This blog won’t be exclusively a research journal, particularly because there are many things I find interesting and worth writing about that aren’t my own work on whatever my current primary project may be. I often find myself exploring connections between biostatistics and areas of pure math and computer science, as well as medicine, public health, and the scientific process in general. I may even be able to offer some helpful advice to other students from time to time.
Sampler 