I know it must have seemed like I dropped off the face of the earth after day 2 of St. Louis.  However, as I indicated I was in no condition to write that night.  I had planned to finish up the blog after I got back to Santa Barbara the next day, but after 5 flight delays, 2 cancellations, and 1 lost bag, I ended up getting home on Monday at around 7:30PM.  Consequently, I’ve been playing catch up as that one day delay ended up putting me really behind in an already busy schedule.  In any case, I’m working furiously right now, and I anticipate the rest of my SABR convention recap to be up in the next few days.  Also, I plan on putting together some kind of work plan for the next three months as well.  I know this doesn’t mean much since it is so late, but I just wanted to let you all know that I’m still here and that I didn’t choke on my own vomit or something weird like that after the Cardinals game.

Adam and Mark????

Today was an intense work day. I did five interviews and attended only one session. The session of course was the Statistical Analysis section, but I got to introduce myself to the group and got a bunch of names for potential interviews. So while it was a very productive day, I am quite exhausted. I’m not sure if it was the cherry coke that I had at 9PM, but I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night, so I was extremely tired when I started the day. I am also tired because I have basically been drinking all day. I bought all of my interview subjects a drink and naturally, I had one myself. Luckily, it was spread out through the day, so it didn’t interfere with the actual interviews. Crap….I just got a call and I have to go do an interview.

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…and I came here alone!

I decided to use today as a exploring day. Since I ended up getting in late, there were only a couple of sessions left anyways, so I decided to go to the sessions that I could and then I had an phone interview at 7. So I didn’t really get to press any flesh, but I figure that tomorrow at the Statistics section meeting, I’ll have the chance to get my name out there. I kinda wish I had the foresight to have business cards made, but there’s nothing to do about it now. Anyways, I’ll try to outline my day with a photo essay.

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In case you can’t tell, the view from my hotel room includes the big arch.

Sorry that I haven’t been updating much, but to be honest, not much has been going on. I’ve interviewed a few more people over the phone, but I’m now here in St. Louis for the big conference. I just got into the hotel room after missing my first flight this morning. This post is going to be a quickie, as I need to go check in at the conference and then start pressing flesh to try and get some interviews scheduled. Anyways, I’m going to try to write a post at least once a day while I’m here to keep you posted on what’s happening from both the dissertation point of view, and from a more personal travel log point of view. It’s been a while since I’ve traveled by myself and I’ve never been to St. Louis before, so hopefully I’ll get to explore the city a little bit. And as I’ve mentioned before, I do want to capture some of the more personal moments of the dissertation process and I think this is a perfect example of something that is a little bit personal but still interesting for posterity’s sake. Anyways, I need to get going, but expect frequent updates about my experiences from the conference in the next three days.