A day in the life of kiki

In addition to just plain being a "Monday," my Mondays are typically filled to the brim with stuff to do. I met with my deception research group at 11am. We met for an hour and I pretty much bluffed my way through (the days of solid preparation for research meetings are long gone). But, I think my undergrad research assistants are afraid of me. Perhaps I'm being too intense during the meeting, but these kids are just not talkative or jovial (as soon as I arrive on scene, that is). It makes me not want to be jovial, either. Or perhaps it was because I responded with a somewhat stern tone after introductory emails in which the students seemed to want me to cater to them. So, yeah, now meetings with them are not so much fun.

Then I traveled to the nearest McDonald's for lunch to go. Yum! I get a lot of flack for being a McDonald's junkie, but I'm pretty much hooked. I squeezed my way into a colleague's office during her office hours and proceeded to have a scholarly discussion about the recent trend that colleges are making towards replacing the SATs with some other predictive measure of student success as I munched on Chicken McNuggets.

I then headed into the computer lab to "work" as a consultant for the next couple of hours. I mercilessly teased the other consultant and managed to embarrass myself when I couldn't figure out how to eject a CD from a Mac. Oh, the pain! "I'm not a Mac person," I proclaim as I shrink down in my leather "computer consultant" chair. Soon the other consultant arrives and I spend an hour helping her with her opinion paper on women in the media. Ahh! Other people's homework is so much more interesting than mine.

After work I headed over to the Seattle's coffee stand in the library in order to get my caffeine shot of the day. I came back and participated in yet one more research meeting with my other cognitive research group (composed of two other grad students). We were certainly more jovial and just barely managed to get some actual work done before class started at 4pm.

Class lasted until a quarter to 7pm and we had fun talking about the biological "metaphor" (whatever that means) of intelligence. Of course, now I must relay the other embarrassing moment of the day. The teacher understood that I had an interest in cognition and that I hail from the cognitive neuroscience background, so she put me on the spot when we talked about event related potentials and whatnot. All was fine until we got to the next chapter on Piaget. Just prior to the class I had jokingly complained to one of my research buddies that I was not interested in Piaget and didn't like reading the chapter on it. Then I joked that he had better not tell anyone about it.

Now that you've guessed the ending of this episode in embarrassment, during the class one of the grad students told a story about how her students said to her, "You really like Piaget, don't you." She tried to explain how important it was to understand his theory to compare it to others. She then appealed to the other students, saying "Wouldn't it seem like all of you like Piaget, too." At which point, my research buddy pipes up and points at me, "Everyone except Kiki. She doesn't like Piaget." I respond, "What! I told you not to tell anyone!"

After the laughter subsided...now everyone knows that I'm not a real educational psychologist because I'm not obsessed with Piaget! My heart belongs to another field!