Thank You Card #12
When I started this blog, I hadn’t written much in the previous five years aside from course papers and research proposals. Although graduate school allowed me to develop my scientific writing, I felt like I’d lost the spark for writing in general. I’ve always written throughout my life, and though I don’t think of myself as a writer, I was feeling disconnected from the part of me that put care into crafting a piece of writing to express a thought, articulate a feeling, or document a moment. It would take effort and practice to regain my non-academic writing style. This blog is, in part, a means of challenging myself to do that.
When I say I don’t think of myself as a writer, it’s because I’m shockingly unimaginative, which limits me to writing only about what I know. Writing is also the one area of my life in which I am super organized and structured. I love to map it all out so that I know where I’m going. This allows me to wander a bit before arriving at my point, which is apparent here to the extent that I often talk about one or two things before getting to the TYC itself. As a means of implementing structure here, I developed a basic set of rules: write a post per week (FAIL); keep each post to (what others would consider) a manageable length (FAIL); give cards to people who can see/read them (i.e., no fictional characters, no inanimate objects). I also made a list of people to whom I was certain I’d give a card—close friends, family, mentors, and others who’ve inspired me—and put one aside to so that I didn’t run out before I got to them.
One of those people was my friend and peer Jiyeon. Jiyeon and I share an advisor and have overlapping research interests, so we’ve spent a lot of time working together over the years. We’ve often been responsible for tasks that could be tedious or monotonous or difficult or just plain time consuming (…or all of the above). Despite that I just made it sound like life as a graduate student researcher isn’t all fun and games, I can look back on the hours we spent in meetings or class, working on our stats homework, editing Julia Roberts movies to use as experimental stimuli, or sitting around while running subjects and think, “Man, that was so fun!!!” Jiyeon is great company. She’s usually in a good mood, she’s got a sharp sense of humor, and she’s one of the few people I’ve met with whom I felt instantly at ease. I remember having coffee with her when I was trying to recruit her to the program, and feeling like I was talking to an old friend.
The photos below also demonstrate that she is a good friend to animals!
I also appreciate that Jiyeon is very wise. Evidence of her wisdom can be seen in the decisions she makes, and is highlighted by those for which I’ve made the opposite choice. For instance, there was one course that she dropped and I (foolishly) kept based on advice that went against my intuition. (Oh, to go back in time and drop that course and take something—anything—else!) I spent the quarter struggling to learn something—anything— and meanwhile she was taking a useful statistics course. We had the same options, but she made the right decision. Jiyeon is self-aware enough to know what’s best for her, and is independent enough to make the corresponding choices. I admire these characteristics and find that they’re especially useful in research, when you’re confronted with decision after decision, any of which can determine the success or failure of your work. I often know what’s best for me, but sometimes lack the boldness to go against the grain. So Jiyeon is an excellent role model as I’ve tried to cultivate these qualities in myself. Now when faced with doing what I feel is best versus what someone else thinks I should do, I think “What Would Jiyeon Do?” and then work up the courage to actually do it.
Finally, this blog is ultimately about Thank You Cards, and TYCs are triggered not by just people being awesome, but more by specific acts of awesomeness. Thus, TYC12 is for Jiyeon because she did a huge favor for me this summer by presenting my paper at the International Communication Association conference in Singapore when I couldn’t be there. We both study media effects and emotion, and my paper applied different media effects theories to explore the ways in which families coping with chronic illness could use media to regulate emotion. Even though her specialty area is risk perception, rather than coping or emotion regulation, she accepted without hesitation and did a fantastic job. For that, I’m grateful.
So, in the spirit of Jiyeon, I made a good decision despite the fact that doing so requires me to break my fourth blog rule, which was that I’d write about TYCs in the order in which I’d given them out. I haven’t even given her this Thank You Card yet; I’ve included it along with a couple birthday gifts that she has to wait for til she gets back from Korea because shipping them there cost more than the actual gifts. But I do want to use this post to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Jiyeon, as well as to thank her for being an awesome friend, and someone I aspire to be more like.
I especially would like her powers to pacify a wild tiger with her hand. How brave! :)
