Ten

I have now completed 10 online applications and have the paperwork (transcripts, etc.) together in envelopes to mail to these programs.  I plan to pick up with the remainder of the 17 applications over Thanksgiving break, and even then, I still have quite a bit of time before those applications are due - the next one after these 10 is due 12/31.

One school's online app is still giving me fits because they did not send me the ID# to use to check the status of my application as they said they would within 3 business days.  I've emailed them about it, but I think I'm going to have to call and ask about it to get anything done.  (I would love to be wrong about that.)  The big issue is that I don't think the automated system has sent out the emails to my recommenders eliciting their letters.  Bah!  I am also annoyed that a couple of schools do online recommendations but do not give you any information about whether they have been completed, so I'll have to follow up with my recommenders individually on those.

In other happy news, I have finished my neuroscience paper!  At least, I have a paper that I've read through once and looks done to me - I'll print it out and read it again in a day or two.  It's due Friday.  (And yes, watch this space for the inevitable Word Cloud when I'm totally done with it.)

Debbie sent this joke to me this week:

"A magician pulls rabbits out of hats. An experimental psychologist pulls habits out of rats."

A good section of my paper is about classical conditioning of eating to external cues in rats (nothing at all like my typical topics in metacognitive aspects of attitude change), so this is strangely apt.  But I will note that experiment psychologists also pull habits out of rabbits.  The eyeblink response in rabbits is a standard animal model of classical conditioning.  I am not, however, familiar with any rat hat research using this paradigm.

But: here is a rat hat for a cat.

And that's that.