akrish

My first week here in Israel was tons of fun, I got to travel a lot, eat good food, go to the beach, and pretty much enjoy the country. Last Sunday, I moved into a dormitory in Ramat Aviv and since then life has been quite a bit different. Several things contributed to this change, but the net result is that I’ve been spending a lot of time working and I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s going to happen after I graduate. First, why are things different…

I started working on Monday (which interestingly is the second day in the work week; the work week is Sunday-Thursday, Friday and Saturday are the weekend.) and so I’ve been pretty busy with work and I haven’t had the opportunity to travel like I did in week one. My work is really cool. I’m working on finding pathways in gene networks that seem to be linked to a specific disease (Here’s the paper I’m building on top if you’re interested). It’s interesting because the problem we’re working on reduces to Connected Set Cover and I just learned about the Set Cover problem in my algorithms class a couple of weeks ago (see this article for why I think this is cool). I’m working on optimizing our algorithm so we can run it on larger data sets efficiently and so that other researchers will be willing have the patience to use it. I’ve already made some progress in my first week (this is good because my time here is pretty short!). I think I’ll write more about my project (and Bioinformatics in general) as I learn more and spend more time working here.

Another key change is that I’m not with my family anymore. Last week I had people (my family) to travel with, and this week, although I’ve been meeting tons of people, I haven’t made many solid friends to do things with. It’s totally not what I expected but the dormitory isn’t really a social place at all. Although the building is 8 floors with many rooms per floor and they say that it’s full, I’ve only ever seen a handful of different people in the building. My lab-mates and other students say that no one wants to live in the dorms because they’re boring and old (the old part is definitely true). Many students prefer to live at home or in Tel Aviv, and then commute to school. Most of the people that I have met here are international students, but I’ve yet to meet a student from the US, although I do hear some American English every once in awhile as I walk around on campus.

One interesting thing is that in Israel everyone goes to serve in the army for 2 (girls) or 3 (guys) years. Then they all usually take a year off and travel before coming to college, so by the time they start their undergrad, they are 21 or 22. They become a lot more focused on their studies and it makes sense that they as “adults” they are just at a different place in life than college students in the US. Most of the people I’ve been meeting are older than me, and that grad students I work with are much, much older than me (many of them have kids!).

Still, I’ve met some really friendly people and I think this “lack of people to do stuff with” condition will quickly disappear. But since I don’t have much to do, I have been getting tons of work done.

I guess another key change is that I moved to Ramat Aviv, which although pretty close to the heart of Tel Aviv (where we stayed in week one), is completely different from Tel Aviv. Ramat Aviv is a much more residential area and as such, you can’t just walk around and find things to do. There aren’t many restaurants around, so I bought a cooking pot and have been making pasta (yup just like at Berkeley) for dinners. Most of the people I’ve talked to also do the same thing. Yesterday, I took the bus to Tel Aviv and enjoyed walking around there; I visited a couple of open air markets, hung out in a guitar store, and wandered around this huge mall. Despite going by myself, it was really fun to explore the city and people watch. Ramat Aviv is not like Tel Aviv at all in that sense. Although there is a pretty big mall (which supposedly is very trendy), there isn’t much else to do. Maybe that explains why students prefer not to stay in the dorms.

Also, I don’t have a roommate. It’s made me realize how cool it is to live with people, be it roommates, family, whatever. I think I’d prefer to have a roommate I didn’t particularly like than to live by myself. So this especially has got me thinking about what life will be like after I graduate. Hopefully, I’ll go to grad school and have a roommate there, but what if I don’t? I really don’t think I’d enjoy it, but maybe it’ll be different if you have a lot of people around, in your building and such. Here it feels like there aren’t that many people around at all.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about graduating and stuff but I think it may warrant it’s own post. Between writing the beginning of this post and now, I went to play ultimate with a team here and it was awesome. They really made me feel welcome even though I’m not on the team, and I don’t speak their language. I plan to keep playing with them and hopefully make some good friends there. A lot of the players on the team have spent a couple of years in the states so they speak english well. And a lot of the players are pretty good so I should get some decent ultimate in over the sumer. Unfortunately, I am really out of shape, and it’s quite hot/humid here so, we’ll see if I can hold my own on the field.

So to summarize this week, it’s been really different from the last week. It’s been interesting meeting people from places like South America, Romania, and of course Israel. Work has been really captivating, which is really good because I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time. I’m making progress on a couple of other projects I’m working on. As I said, it’s been different, but it’s still been pretty good.