Day 1 — Oct 5 (Mon) · Korea’s National Foundation Day

It was a Monday like any other.

At lunch I listened to a talk on CD8 T cell exhaustion at the immunology WIPS, ran experiments into the evening, and the sunset on my way home was beautiful.

.. Except for the fact that a guest was coming to my place!

All the way from Korea, after a 14-hour flight, he came to Texas! Well, to be precise, he met another friend in Kansas City first and then took a domestic flight here.

He’s an older friend, a hyung, I’d told myself I had to see before leaving to study abroad, so seeing him here in Texas like this felt special.

His schedule was three days and two nights: arriving late at night on the first day and leaving very early on the morning of the third. It was a short time, but the memories are still as vivid as if it were yesterday.

First, I picked him up at the airport. I don’t think it had even been a year since I’d last seen him, but every time, he has this way of putting people at ease.

Tacos, and then a drink each at a casual bar near my place. (My favorite, the Grapevine bar! The air on the patio was cool.)

It was a short, rambling night, but we raced to unload the stories of how our lives had been chasing us, and the first night went on late.

Day 2 — Oct 6 (Tue) · Paycheck Lupin!

In Korea there’s a term, “wollu.” It’s short for “wolgeup Lupin,” a paycheck Lupin: someone who collects a salary while slacking off like the gentleman thief.

It’s a little odd to call myself that, but as someone who does officially draw a salary in grad school, today I became the Lupin and savored the whole day.

The original plan was to leave around 3 or 4 p.m. and spend time with hyung. But there was just no way. The moment the clock hit noon, I explained the situation to my supervisor and said I thought I needed to spend time with my friend.

Honestly, the US is pretty generous about this kind of thing. But behind that generosity, of course, comes accountability, and next week’s me will be the one paying for it.

…

Day 3 — Oct 7 (Wed) · East of Eden

Day 4 - Oct 8 (Thu) · Biophysics Retreat

Day 5 - Oct 9 (Fri) · The Aftermath

You didn’t misread that.

That’s right. I’m going to cover three days in one section.

The reason being, after hyung left I struggled with low energy for a while, and nothing much happened.

On Wednesday I started watching a Netflix series called East of Eden. It’s based on the 1952 novel by John Steinbeck, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

Anyway, since it comes from a novel whose brilliance was recognized just ten years later, it was so incredibly gripping that I binged the whole thing in no time. (Not in one day.. I have a life too)

Then the next day, Thursday, we had a full-day retreat with the Biophysics division. The format was that everyone took turns giving a short 10–20 minute talk introducing their research topic.

And on Friday, on the verge of collapse, I got an emergency transfusion of In-N-Out burger and tried hard to get my daily life back into its usual rhythm.

Day 6 - Oct 10 (Sat) · Genes Exam 1 D-3

That’s right. It was three days before the exam.

Freedom comes with enormous responsibility, and it was time to settle the receipt for all the freedom I’d enjoyed.

On weekends I eat two meals: brunch and dinner. I had brunch, studied at a café, and then had dinner.

And my credit card finally arrived!

Even now, as I write this, tomorrow’s exam is closing in. (Please forgive me if this post is short!)

Day 7 - Oct 11 (Sun) · Marshall Stanmore III

My birthday is coming up soon.

My girlfriend offered to buy me a birthday present, and it was a Marshall Stanmore III speaker!

I spent a lot of time thinking about what to buy to make a spot for the speaker. A regular speaker stand would be useless for anything other than holding a speaker, and way too expensive for that.

So what I came up with was a small table, about the size of a side table, and there happened to be a good listing on Facebook Marketplace (think of it as the American version of Danggeun Market), so I went to check it out.

I came home wondering when the speaker would arrive, and wouldn’t you know it, there was a box I’d never seen before? I opened it, and it was exactly what I’d been waiting for.

I quickly set up the table and the speaker, connected it to the TV to try it as a TV speaker, and connected my phone to play my playlist, and I was so, so happy with it!

The bass was way punchier than the Marshall Acton III I used back in my KATUSA days. And how do I put it, the sense of space in the sound? My place is fairly roomy for living alone, and it filled the space with sound really well.

Right, this is no time for that.

I had lunch, went to study at a café until I’d more or less wrapped things up (peak of Mount Stupid, that is), squeezed in the workout I’d missed during the week, snapped my usual photo of the decorated Student Center on the way out, and ended the day with dinner.

Week 10 in the US. Hosting a guest from Korea used up all my energy.

But he was that precious a guest to me, and I think we had so much fun there’s nothing to regret.

Whenever I see hyung, I always end up looking back at myself. Is it because the way he enjoys life seems so different from mine?

Part of me envies him, and part of me wonders whether I could ever live that freely. But everyone has their own life and their own struggles, right?

It was an honor to host such a precious guest in my humble place, and my door is always open, so here’s to the next guest.

And now I need to get back to my daily life, too.

Day 1 — Sep 28 (Mon) · Goodbye, Proteins!

Today was finally the last day of Proteins. If you look back at last week’s post, you can see how confident this guy was, and this was an exam whose shocking difficulty left me deeply crushed..

Luckily, it didn’t seem like I was the only one who found it hard. Sighs were coming from every direction.. and afterward we all gathered and gave the professor a good piece of our minds.

The donuts set out in the student lounge calmed my angry heart a bit, and then, completely out of the blue, my Big sib had prepared a Starbucks gift card and a cake that looked like candy, and my mood was totally restored!

Here’s hoping Genes goes a lot better..

Day 2 — Sep 29 (Tue) · Genes Begins!

Today was a bit of a busy day. I left the lab at 3 p.m. with a lot still to get done. That’s right, it was that day. The day I picked up my watch!

While I was at it, I drove an hour to Frisco to finish off the living room. And after that, a nice dinner with a younger Korean friend!

The start went smoothly. Robbins Jewelry. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been there. It took a whole two weeks after ordering before I finally got the watch, and just like food at a restaurant with a long wait somehow has to be good, the watch on my wrist was completely satisfying!

Then off to Frisco to buy a living room table. The whole way there, I kept wondering whether it really made sense to drive an hour for one table, but the skeleton family greeting me at the entrance was just too cute.

Above all, it was in great condition, and the size was a perfect fit for my living room. I’d been looking for a lift-top table, and while it isn’t perfectly smooth, it’s pretty decent. And I figured a round table would make it easier for everyone to sit around it when I have guests over someday!

And then, dinner with my younger Korean friend! He’s not the type to ask for things like this, but one day out of nowhere he asked me to go to Trader Joe’s with him. Did he need a ride because he doesn’t have a car? He’s always the one who worries first about being a bother to me, so something felt off. Sure enough, saying I’d done a lot for him lately, he went and paid for dinner;; before I could even stop him..

The place we went to was a Vietnamese restaurant, but it felt like someone had added a spoonful of a strangely American vibe, or rather accidentally poured in a bit more than the recipe called for. The atmosphere was very upscale, and every single dish was seriously good. The fried wings in pad thai sauce stuck with me. The sauce felt like a bit of a reinterpretation, but it was the best chicken I’ve had in a while.

Next time I’ll have to treat him to something good. He’s a friend I’m grateful for in so many ways! We’ve decided to visit my cousin’s place in Washington, D.C. together at the end of November, and I hope we have a great time there.

Day 3 — Sep 30 (Wed) · Hanging Out with Korean Friends!

Of course, once an exam is over, you have to play. There’d been a call to go conquer a taco place we’d had our eye on for a while, and right after the exam was the perfect timing.

But this week, very un-Texas-like weather was on the way. A downpour had started!

In the end, with the forecast calling for way too much rain, we had to give up on tacos. Still, we had to eat dinner, right? So I boldly invited everyone over to test the power of my new table.

I assumed we’d just order delivery at my place, but my kind friends said they had to give me time to clean up.. and that they’d go pick up takeout from a Korean fried chicken place.. (And the next day, while eating the leftover chicken, I found out these guys had left only the drumsticks and wings for me; endlessly touched..)

Anyway, so I had a quick lunch, attended a lecture by Joseph Takahashi, an HHMI investigator at UTSW and a leading figure in aging research, finally picked up my SSN card, which had arrived by mail! And then I had a great time with my friends over a delicious dinner.

Day 4 - Oct 1 (Thu) · Korea’s Armed Forces Day

It was an ordinary day with nothing especially special about it.

I had a potato corn dog and a rice ball for lunch, and then plastered the entire apartment with the bug killer my Korean friend from yesterday lent me. (Yes.. there had been a serious discussion about Mr. Cockroach)

My apartment doesn’t have indoor parking, so I have to park outside, which means the car is exposed to all kinds of grime and the elements.

Once, there was a very sticky liquid splattered on the front of the car, and I tried to wipe it off, but it just wouldn’t come off, and I figured out it was tree sap. So I bought a few cleaning supplies on Amazon and worked hard to get it off. It’s not 100% gone yet, but unless you look closely you can’t tell, so I’ve decided to just live with it.

Yesterday when my friends came over, there was a bit of chaos because I didn’t have small plates or cups, and I guess you only get the motivation to fix the barn after you’ve lost the cow.

Day 5 - Oct 2 (Fri) · Experiments or Rest, What Really Matters?

Starting today, for about four days, so until next Monday, my supervisor is away from the lab.

There’s an event called a Gala, where wealthy people are invited, research is presented, and donations are raised. (This was a new culture to me too.. I wonder if there’s something like this in Korea?) It’s being held in LA, so today and next Monday I get some time to myself.

Still, we’d talked through what I should work on while they’re away, and I got started on experiments right away. That said, I’d designed the experiment with much trickier details than usual, so it was a day that demanded a bit more focus.

I also want to write down a conversation I had with another postdoc that stuck with me.

Every time I happened to come in on a weekend, he was always there, so I was curious. Do you like coming in on weekends?

He looked at me like I was strange.. who would like that, he said. He told me that back when he was a PhD student, he never came in on weekends.

He said a PhD is very long and hard, and that’s exactly why keeping a good work-life balance matters even more. And he told me that what’s important is to focus as hard as you can during the time you’re at school, design your experiments very efficiently, and get results.

The biggest strength of this lab is that there are great postdocs and great colleagues like this everywhere you turn.

…

Anyway, that’s the story of how I squeezed in lunch in the middle of experiments, spent a moment debating whether to buy a Stanmore III during Amazon Prime Day on October 6 and 7 next week, finished all my experiments, went for a short workout during the hour and a half the measuring instrument was running, and grilled thin-sliced pork belly for dinner.

I usually work out at a place called the MD Student Center, and the lobby was decorated so nicely that it put me in a good mood too. And the combination of my new lift-top table and the TV is a work of art.

Day 6 - Oct 3 (Sat) · Am I Finally Creditworthy?!

The day has finally come. The last gate of paperwork hell: a credit card.

How long I’ve waited for this day. It’s been almost a month since I applied for my SSN, and it’s already been more than two months since I came to the US.

Chase offers many different credit cards, but the ones an outsider like me (with zero credit) can get are very limited. And my friends, who got their SSNs well before me, were issued the most basic credit card, the Chase Freedom Rise.

At the time I was impatient, so I was planning to get the same card. But the more urgent things are, the more you should take the long way around. Maybe, since more time had passed, I’d built up enough history to get a card one level higher? With that thought, I applied for the Unlimited, a step above the Freedom Rise.

The result: a huge success! The card was approved the moment I applied, and now I’m officially creditworthy too! I’ll play the Credit Game hard with this and build good credit.

And by the time I pass my Qualifying exam two years from now, the gate to becoming a PhD candidate, will my good credit let me splurge on a Tesla Model Y on installments? (Of course, I’m just thinking about it)

Less than a week after I got the watch, a stain appeared on the first strap that came with it. It was a bit long to begin with, so I always had to tuck the end in, which was a little annoying. Because of that, the watch started to look a bit ugly, and I wanted an alternative.

One option I found thanks to a ton of Googling was the Google Fitbit Air. It wasn’t made for that purpose, but it fits watches with fixed lugs, it can also monitor my health data, and above all, I liked the design, so it seemed like a decent option.

I looked into ways to buy it right away, and Amazon shipping was taking almost two weeks. Luckily, the Target nearby offered online order and pickup, so I went for it immediately.

But my wrist turned out to be much thinner than I thought, and it didn’t fit. On top of that, there were lots of reviews saying the Fitbit Air’s measurements are somewhat inaccurate, so I returned it without any regrets.

And next week, my first guest from Korea is coming. That’s also one of the reasons I rushed to set up the apartment.

Suddenly buying a TV, and then a living room table. Of course I bought them for myself, but somehow, knowing a guest was coming from so far away, I wanted to welcome him with the place a bit better put together.

So I stopped by IKEA to pick up a few more kitchen things I needed.

To keep myself from getting lazy, I’d bought only the bare minimum of bowls and utensils and washed up after every single meal, but that started to feel like a bit much.

Now I’ve added enough dishes to cover about two meals a day, and I bought small plates and glasses I can easily put out when friends come over.

Then I went to H-mart (a Korean grocery store) and picked up various things I needed. The guy visiting from Korea, an older friend I call hyung, arrives next Monday evening and leaves early Wednesday morning, so I want to show him as much as I can in that short time.

I’ve also arranged to introduce him to the Japanese friend I always sit with in class, and the plan is to eat Texas barbecue together and then invite everyone over and feed them all kinds of things.

Day 7 - Oct 4 (Sun) · Katy Trail Run

Maybe because it rained all week, the Texas heat has eased off a notch.

The weather was cool, and a refreshing breeze was blowing. I was a little worried the wet ground wouldn’t be good for running, but I decided to go out and run anyway.

I finally went to the Katy Trail, which I’d always put off, blaming the weather, telling myself I’d go someday. The scenery was so much better than I expected that I couldn’t focus on running and ended up sightseeing instead.

I ran for about 20 minutes and walked for the other 40 or so, sorting through all kinds of stray thoughts, and breathing in all that fresh forest air while my head got a reset made it the best kind of rest. I’ll have to make chances to run more often.

Week 9 in the US. In a way it was a very smooth week, but there was one big problem. On Tuesday, September 30, I went to the SSA office to get my SSN card reissued.

Here’s what happened: the receipt said that if you don’t receive your SSN card by mail within two weeks of applying, you have to apply again,

and since I’d waited a whole four weeks and it still hadn’t come, I went to apply again.

But oh no! The very next day after reapplying, Wednesday, October 1, it arrived in the mail. If only I’d waited one more day.. but what’s done is done.

At that point, I thought I had to keep waiting for the newly requested SSN card, but it turned out that wasn’t the case. Since the new card is issued with the same number anyway, the SSN on the earlier letter is valid too! (I only found that out on Saturday, right before applying for the credit card..)

Anyway, it all worked out in the end, but it was a brutal critical hit of the bitter taste of American bureaucracy, and I wasn’t in a great mood about it. Even so, it’s a touching ending where I successfully got my credit card and everything got resolved.

The US seems to be a place that demands a little more patience than I actually have.

Day 1 — Sep 21 (Mon) · An Ordinary Day

It started like any ordinary Monday. Except I hadn’t shaken off going into the lab the day before, so I was much more tired than usual.

There’s something I saw on YouTube in passing that I want to note down here. It was about what people who’ve achieved solid results in their own field — sports, business, whatever — have in common.

First, they don’t overperform. They draw a clear upper limit for themselves, and even when they still have energy left, they have a habit of saying “that’s it for today” and resting.

Second, they’re certain about what to take on. Out of 25 different areas you’re interested in and want to be good at, you pick the 5 you most want to focus on, and you practice ruthlessly letting go of the other 20.

This is also something that stuck with me from a conversation with a younger friend I really like, back when we met while he was serving in the Air Force. He’s now achieving exactly what he wanted in the field he loves most, investing. I always knew his potential would explode someday, but he really is amazing, and someone I want to learn from.

Anyway, back to the point: the previous day’s overperforming ended up hurting me on this day. I need to keep my balance as well as I can and prepare for the long run.

So: I snacked on chocolate in a corner of campus, got a message that the RRL piece was ready at the store, scrolled through used listings looking for a desk, and had bulgogi for dinner.

Day 2 — Sep 22 (Tue) · Experiments, and More Experiments

It was a day like any other. Except for the fact that I went home at 9 p.m… Just as I was recovering from the previous day’s overperforming and finding my rhythm again, it got stolen away by experiments once more.

The start was ordinary. I had a Bibigo bulgogi rice ball and a potato corn dog for lunch in a campus lobby, and since keeping a separate keyboard and mouse for the iMac was annoying, I managed to link it with my MacBook so the two are recognized as separate computers but share the MacBook’s keyboard and mouse. (So convenient.. the Apple ecosystem really is great.)

Then my supervisor arrived late in the afternoon, saying they’d just seen their family off and were only now getting to work, and we started an experiment together.

Since the last experiment kept giving bad results, this was the day to pull new cells from the cell bank and test them. The problem was just that we started way too late.

Luckily, I had pushed my English conversation session to 9 p.m., so as soon as I got home I wolfed down some dinner and was able to start the session.

• Your current work : Explain it to someone who have less backgrounds
• Is ignorance sometimes better than knowledge
• Cultural difference you’ve encountered in the US

The very first question was a bit challenging, but analogies really do seem to be the most intuitive way to explain things. Once I compared immune cells migrating into an organ to a person walking through a door, it became much easier to explain.

Also, one thing I’ve noticed since coming to the US is that a lot of people always walk around with a smile on their face. In Korea, nobody walks down the street smiling like that, and it made me wonder what shaped such different cultures.

Day 3 — Sep 23 (Wed) · Is It the Cells, or Is It Me?

Just like last week, I analyzed yesterday’s experiment right away today.

Fortunately the results came out well, so it looks like the cells were the problem, and we decided to move straight on to the next analysis.

And next week is finally the day we apply the experiment I’ve spent about two months setting up to patient samples. Depending on those results, this project either ends here or moves on to the next step.

My guess is there’s about a 5% chance of getting a positive result. Let’s see if luck is on my side again.

Dinner was fried rice and dumplings from Trader Joe’s, with some Korean kimchi on the side.

Day 4 - Sep 24 (Thu) · Nature’s Typo

Since the Casanova group I belong to moved to UT Southwestern, several groups have been brought together under the big theme of inborn errors of immunity, holding a seminar every other week.

That’s Nature’s Typo — about the typos that nature itself makes. Today, Sonja from our lab presented on the connection between autophagy and viral immunity, and I listened hard to something new over some delicious pizza.

I also saved a Texas Roadhouse tip for whenever I end up going. Dalsaram.com, a Korean online community here, occasionally has useful info like this, so I’ve been saving them one by one, not knowing when I’ll need them.

Dinner was Trader Joe’s fried rice and coconut shrimp, which I tried for the first time. The coconut shrimp was decent, but maybe because I left it in the air fryer too long, it wasn’t quite crispy enough. Next time I’ll try a shorter time.

Day 5 - Sep 25 (Fri) · Mouse!

Probably not the mouse you’re imagining. It’s a computer mouse!

Like last Friday, I spent the day cleaning up the lab with everyone. When a huge lab moves in, the organizing never ends.

But in return, we were treated to a lovely curry lunch.

And the mouse! The MacBook trackpad is nice, but it gets a bit hard on my wrist over really long hours of work, so I ordered a mouse.

I used to use a model called the MX Master 3S, and it was so comfortable that I looked it up again — turns out the MX Master 4 just came out, so I ordered it. ($130 for a mouse, but let’s keep that between us..)

Money really is nice.

Day 6 - Sep 26 (Sat) · Exam Prep, Part One

Finally the day to start the studying I’d been putting off. Oh wait, before that, there’s one more thing I ordered.

A TV! I had a sofa but nothing in the living room, so I never really used it, and I finally made up my mind and bought a TV.

A 65-inch Samsung mini LED, for about $450 including tax. It seems way cheaper than in Korea.

I’d originally been browsing Facebook Marketplace for a used TV, but there were so many things to consider that I kept putting it off.

I started to think that at this rate I’d never buy a TV, and then, seeing myself debating whether to spend $400 on an RRL jacket and pants, I took a moment to rethink what I actually need right now.

There’ll be another chance for RRL someday. This time, I decided to put that money into a TV. And it really was the right choice.

I bought the TV on Amazon, and there was a delivery option where they unbox it and set it up on the TV stand, which I picked — super convenient! Now all I need is a desk for the living room and it’s complete.

In a good mood, I went to the Starbucks near my place and knocked out the studying I’d been putting off, bit by bit. And wow, I found an all-time favorite menu item: the Salted Caramel Cream Cold Brew.

When I try different drinks and find one that’s exactly to my taste, it really lifts my mood.

Day 7 - Sep 27 (Sun) · Exam Prep, Part Two

Yesterday’s studying went pretty well, so I got further than I expected. (Though maybe I’m just stuck on the peak of Mount Stupid.)

Anyway, because of that, I lazed around at home, had In-N-Out for lunch, and headed to Knox Street, one of my favorite spots.

This neighborhood is always bustling with Americans. That’s how loved it is.

It’s over by Uptown, and if I get the chance someday, I’d like to live around here too. Of course, since it has such a great vibe and is so popular, rent is 30–40% higher.

The parking lot was packed, and I barely managed to find a spot — that’s where I’m writing this. All that’s left now is to go home, have dinner, finish the cleaning I put off yesterday, and do the final, final, last-last review for tomorrow’s exam.

Oh, and while browsing Facebook Marketplace I found a lift-top table that looked pretty good. It’s quite far away, but it seemed like a good enough deal to be worth it, so I’m picking it up sometime next week. The day my living room is finally complete isn’t far off.

Week 8 in the US. My watch still hasn’t been delivered, so no review yet, but I’m counting on getting it next week for sure.

And I want to write briefly about routines.

Routine - Eat breakfast and take my supplements. - No caffeine after 12 p.m. - Eat lunch and dinner on time, within ±1 hour. - Go to bed before 10 p.m. - Go to the gym or run at least 3 times a week. - Clean every weekend.

It’s all about nutrition, sleep, and keeping things in order.

If I can keep these habits up well this year, that means I’ve adapted well to this life, which in turn means I can focus on my research and get results during my PhD.

In other words, to have a successful PhD, all I have to do is stick to this routine! Such a simple calculation.

Anyway, I’ll cherish the routine that protects me from all sorts of dangers, and keep sticking to it.

Day 1 — Sep 14 (Mon) · Even the tiniest obstacle can ruin everything

It was the start of a tough week. And the trouble began with a small reagent that’s absolutely basic to any experiment.

Among all the materials used in experiments, antibodies in particular are very expensive, and only a tiny amount is used each time — so to keep the active component intact, we usually make aliquots. Put simply, that means splitting the reagent into very small portions, each just enough for a single experiment.

So today was the day I planned to sit down with my supervisor and divide the newly ordered reagents into lots of vials. That is, until the label printer for the aliquots started acting up.

As usual, I counted cells and moved them into a nice, comfortable environment for them to grow. Today was also WIPS day — the program where students in the immunology program give presentations every two weeks — so I attended that too.

Then, when I finally got ready to start the aliquots, the computer connected to the label printer was completely dead. I tried two things: swapping the monitor, and connecting the printer to a different computer.

Swapping the monitor changed nothing, so it was clear the computer itself was the problem, and I was struggling to hook the printer up to my own MacBook. I looked up the printer’s model name, downloaded the software, and even got it connected — but probably because it didn’t match the label stock we were using, nothing I wanted showed up on the label.

Back to square one, I tried to fix the computer. When we couldn’t manage it ourselves, we asked another senior, Bertrand, for help. He figured the problem was the video output card (?) attached to the machine, and pulled that part out of the computer so the signal would go through a different port.

And unbelievably, it started working!

Of course, all of this ended up dragging on until late in the evening, so I finished the day having done none of the aliquots I’d aimed for — only printing a pile of labels and getting things ready for the next day.

Day 2 — Sep 15 (Tue) · Experiments, and more experiments

Today was a fairly important experiment day. Together with my supervisor, we were running two experiments at the same time.

And in the middle of those experiments, the plan was to also get through the aliquots I hadn’t finished yesterday.

…

The gap between someone who has spent nearly ten years in one field and someone who hasn’t is beyond anything I imagined. He moves as if the whole protocol were stored in his head — as if he were simulating, in his mind, the movements of cells you can’t even see and how each reagent he adds will interact with them.

Of course, he explains as much as he can while he works, so I think I’m following about 80% of it. But when things get really complicated, even he stops explaining and just moves on quickly, so whenever that happens I jot it down and go through a very long review afterward.

Why did he do it this way at that moment? Would I have done it this way? Thinking through questions like these sometimes teaches me something really important for the first time, and at other times leaves me confused about how much I’m still missing right now. I comfort myself by thinking that every rotation student is probably going through something similar.

…

I’m also taking one-on-one English conversation tutoring — about 40 minutes at 7 PM every Tuesday and Thursday — and today, right on schedule, that time came around. The experiment ran long, though, so I was about an hour late, and I felt terrible about it. When I explained what happened, my tutor kindly said their schedule happened to be open and gladly moved the session, which was a huge relief.

I got home at 7:45 PM, reheated some fried rice at a crazy speed, and wolfed it down with a hot dog without even knowing what I was eating. Then 8 o’clock. Today’s lesson topics were:

• milestones in your life
• Your personality
• In terms of living, do you prefer big cities or small towns

When I talk in English, I feel like I discover sides of myself I didn’t know about. I recall reading somewhere that you should try making important decisions in as many different languages as you can, and this felt similar. I probably wouldn’t have put things this way in Korean, and I was quietly surprised to observe myself expressing who I am in a slightly different way, thanks to the brevity and directness of English.

I also felt grateful to my tutor, who draws all this out so naturally. Once I started thinking of this class not as a simple English lesson but as training to discover a self I hadn’t known and to widen my own range of thought, it felt even more meaningful.

Day 3 — Sep 16 (Wed) · Failing over and over

I stored the experiment I’d finished yesterday, and today was the day to analyze the results myself.

There’s always tension and excitement mixed together at this moment.

Did the results come out the way I expected? I look at them with everything I’ve got, and yet I always end up facing something different from what I imagined.

The deep disappointment lasts only a moment, and then I start thinking through all the different things that might have made the difference. I guess I’m slowly getting used to failing.

Anyway, both my supervisor and I were quite thrown by the unexpected result, and as we discussed the various possibilities, we started to wonder whether something might be wrong with the cells themselves.

So next week, we decided to take out the frozen parental cells and repeat the experiment. Before that, to be surer about whether this was really a cell problem, he asked me to run an experiment on my own, and for that I headed to school at 6 AM on Friday to do it… (continued in Friday’s entry)

Day 4 — Sep 17 (Thu) · Taking a breather

It was a bit of a draining week.

Maybe because the experiment didn’t turn out as expected, or maybe because the nonstop full-blast air conditioning in every indoor space brought my AC-induced cold back.

So today, to get my rhythm back, I boldly decided to take it a little easy.

The cafeteria always serves more or less the same food, and other than the Texas cheeseburger I haven’t found anything worth it there. But I can’t eat only burgers day after day, so I had pizza for the first time in a while.

It tasted good while I was eating, but before long I felt bloated. This is why, even when I’m hungry at lunch, I end up not eating much. My stomach was uncomfortable, so I wandered around the building and found a secret spot with a really healing view, where I stayed for about 30 minutes to rest.

Since this is Texas, everything is somewhat hard to get to. Even a simple grocery run, for example — the nearest Trader Joe’s is 15 minutes by car, and H Mart is 20. By Texas standards that’s definitely close, but the fact that anywhere I go, it’s “n minutes or more by car” isn’t exactly something I love.

School life is no exception. Of course, the campus has everything I need, like cafés and restaurants. But since there’s only one choice of each, on days when I crave something a little different I strangely have to get in the car. And as a grad student, driving off campus just for lunch or a café always leads to the conclusion that it isn’t time-efficient, so I still haven’t tried a different place for lunch.

…

And then today’s second English conversation session. We covered these topics today:

• definition of success
• is it important to be liked by others?
• pros and cons of social media

I’d never thought that deeply about social media, but I found out that I want other people’s attention more than I’d realized. Actually, it’s less about wanting attention and more that I seem to have a desire for my influence to reach a lot of people.

In the end, the drug development I want to pursue after grad school comes from the same place — the wish to step out of the role of a local pharmacist and help benefit many more patients.

Still, for society to function properly, someone has to be a local pharmacist and someone has to develop new drugs. Both are equally needed. Even so, I felt that work demanding a bit more scientific aptitude was the right fit for me, and that I’m now wearing a rather satisfying outfit.

Day 5 — Sep 18 (Fri) · Hanging out with my lab mates!

The big day had come. I had a busy day trying to finish, on time, the experiment my supervisor had talked about.

0900-1030 Lab meeting 1130-1300 Lab organization meeting 1400-1600 Lab Genetics analysis meeting

With three different meetings in this one day alone, there was no way I could finish the experiment on time using the gaps in between.

So on Thursday before leaving, I did the pre-processing for Friday’s experiment ahead of time, and today I woke up at the crack of dawn and rushed to school to start the experiment.

It had been quite a while since I moved so proactively, giving up sleep of my own free will. Sleep matters a lot to me, and most things — even pharmacy school exams — never made me give it up.

Was it that big of a shock, the failure of last Tuesday’s experiment? Or was I just really curious about my own hypothesis for why it failed? I don’t understand myself well enough yet, and neither answer felt wrong.

Anyway, I finished the experiment early in the morning as planned, had breakfast, and wrapped up the rest of the experiment. Then I ate the pizza provided at the Lab Organization meeting for lunch. (If I’d known, I wouldn’t have had pizza yesterday! Still, pizza from a real pizza place beats the pizza at the cafeteria here by a mile.)

I finished the analysis in the afternoon, and once again the results weren’t quite right. When I told my supervisor, he said there seemed to be a problem with the cells, so next week we’ll test the system again with new cells.

And then, hanging out with the lab! We went to a place called Bishop Arts Street — to borrow the local way of putting it, it’s full of cute shops and a cozy place overall.

It was a pretty hip neighborhood, with a decent number of souvenir shops and good bars. What stuck with me most was a bar run as a bookstore — buy a book and get a free drink! Of course, I have papers to read, so I didn’t buy a book.

Then I had drinks with seven people from the lab. Two postdocs (Ahmad, Jessica), four trainees (Maira, Maxime, Brooklyn, and me), and Ahmad’s younger brother, visiting from Paris (sorry, I forgot his name..) — seven in total.

My supervisor Ahmad is called a rising star for how good his research is, but he’s just as serious about having fun. I was pretty much dragged along, and after a brutal schedule since the morning I was very tired, but I was having so much fun with everyone that I tried to stay as long as I could.

It was almost my first time really spending time with American friends. Maybe it’s a cultural difference since they’re from New York, but they started drinking on an empty stomach, no food. We just kept drinking for a long while, and it was only around 8 PM that we went to get dinner. I was really tired and not very hungry, so I said my goodbyes on the way to dinner and headed home.

On my friends’ recommendation I ordered an Aperol spritz, which was very refreshing and delicious. I looked it up later — it’s an Italian wine-based cocktail, about 11% ABV. There are several kinds of spritz, so next time I’ll try a different one.

Day 6 — Sep 19 (Sat) · Balloon Festival

Today was such a, such a full day. It’s going to run a bit long, so I’m splitting it into three sections.

Day 7 — Sep 20 (Sun) · Going into the lab

Today was the first time I went into the lab on a weekend. After the failed experiments, we figured something had gone wrong with the cells, and my supervisor messaged me that he’d go to school this Sunday to take out new cells. And the cells we’d been using would be frozen down and put back into stock.

I felt it was only right that I do this, so I happily said I’d come along and learn. I planned to hit the gym afterward, so I headed to the lab in my workout clothes.

I was wrong to think no one would be there. The postdocs were running experiments day and night, even on weekends, and a few of the trainees were at their desks too.

Seeing them work with such a sense of responsibility for their own projects — with nobody telling them to — made me reflect on myself. How much am I really giving my work?

The freeze-down we’d planned couldn’t go ahead because the cells weren’t in good shape, so we swapped in fresh media and left it for another day.

Week 7 in the US, and after all the failures, things have gone quiet. As I declared at the start of this post, I wasn’t able to cut it down. Maybe because each passing moment still feels so precious, I haven’t been able to trim things away easily.

Next week I’ll be more mindful and set a much stricter standard for what counts as unnecessary. And my exam is scheduled for the very next Monday after that!

Once I’ve gotten through the exam, I’ll be back — maybe with a sauna trip with Ryoske, or a review of the watch, the pants, or the trucker jacket, whichever I end up buying.

The immune system is watching for cancer

Our immune system doesn’t just clear viruses and bacteria — it also hunts down and eliminates abnormally transformed cells. This is called cancer immunosurveillance.

Tumors arise more easily when the immune system isn’t working properly, and conversely, treatments like immune checkpoint inhibitors can suppress cancer — both facts point to how central the immune system is to whether cancer develops and how it progresses.

But there’s a major open question here.

Why does one person’s immune system surveil cancer effectively, while another’s doesn’t?

Bastard and colleagues propose that part of the answer may lie in antibodies.

Antibodies aren’t just a record of past defense

Our bodies carry a diverse set of antibodies that reflect what we’ve encountered in the past. Get infected by a virus, and antibodies against that virus appear. Get vaccinated, and antibodies against that specific antigen form. In that sense, the antibody repertoire is a kind of immunological record.

But antibodies don’t just record past immune responses — some of them can actually change the function of the protein they target. In particular, autoantibodies, which attack proteins that make up our own body, can directly block or alter specific immune functions.

This is already well established in infectious disease. For example, the chain

anti-type I IFN autoantibody → blocks IFN-α/ω function → weakens antiviral immunity → severe viral infection

has been observed directly in patients. Autoantibodies that neutralize IL-10 have also been linked to inflammatory bowel disease. In other words, a single autoantibody can selectively disable a specific immune pathway and cause disease.

Which naturally raises the next question:

What if there are autoantibodies that attack the immune pathways responsible for surveilling cancer?

There may be autoantibodies that interfere with cancer immunosurveillance

The core hypothesis Bastard and colleagues put forward is this:

Each person’s antibody repertoire may shape their cancer immunosurveillance differently.

Say a given person has a particular autoantibody. If that antibody

• blocks a tumor-promoting pathway, or
• strengthens a tumor-reactive immune response,

→ it could act to suppress cancer development.

Conversely, if it

• blocks a tumor-restricting immune pathway, or
• interferes with T-cell-mediated tumor surveillance,

→ it could promote cancer development or progression.

In other words, an antibody isn’t merely a “sign that cancer is present” — in some cases, it may be a biological modifier that directly influences whether and how cancer develops.

So which antibodies should we actually look for?

This is where the paper gets interesting. The authors don’t limit themselves to a single class of antibody. Broadly, there are three to consider.

① Antibodies against normal self-proteins — autoantibodies

Examples: cytokines, receptors, checkpoint molecules, complement regulators, enzymes, integrins, and other cell-surface proteins. The paper’s Table 1 explicitly lists integrins among the candidate autoantigens.

② Antibodies against antigens that newly appear in cancer — tumor-associated / tumor-specific antibodies

Antibodies against mutated or tumor-specific proteins.

③ Antibodies against external antigens

Antibodies that reflect past exposure to viruses, bacteria, fungi, and other microbes.

The approach, in short: don’t decide in advance which antibodies matter to cancer — cast as wide a net as possible.

What matters most isn’t “discovery” — it’s “function”

There’s an important trap here. Finding that a cancer patient has elevated levels of a particular autoantibody doesn’t mean that antibody caused the cancer. It could simply be a downstream consequence of the cancer or an infection.

That’s why the authors insist that discovery must always be followed by functional assays. The logical chain looks like this:

Discover an antibody → identify its target → confirm binding → does it affect the target’s function? → does it actually change an immune pathway? → does it connect to a cancer phenotype?

Only by going through these steps can you distinguish a bystander antibody from one that’s actually functionally involved in disease mechanism.

Which is where ATLAS comes in

This question can’t be answered with a handful of patients. So the authors formed ATLAS, an international, multidisciplinary team. The goal, in short: build a Cancer Antibody Atlas.

The plan is to profile antibody repertoires at scale across diverse populations — comparing, for example, cancer-free individuals, people who developed cancer, high-risk individuals who never developed cancer, and patients undergoing immunotherapy.

Technically, this means using platforms that can screen an enormous number of antibody specificities at once — human proteome microarrays, PhIP-seq, phage/yeast display, and new DNA-based serological assays — to search for antibodies in an agnostic, unbiased way.

Whenever an interesting antibody turns up, it gets brought back into the lab, following the chain:

Discovery → functional validation → mechanism → clinical phenotype

In the end, it’s about finding “good antibodies” and “bad antibodies”

Panel C of Figure 1 above captures this concept most directly.

Protective antibodies: block a tumor-promoting pathway, or activate a tumor-restricting pathway → stronger cancer immunosurveillance

Deleterious antibodies: activate a tumor-promoting pathway, or block a tumor-restricting pathway → weakened cancer immunosurveillance

And some antibodies, even with no functional effect at all, could still serve as biomarkers that predict cancer risk or treatment response.

An even more interesting question: this connects to cancer treatment too

This framework connects not just to whether cancer develops, but to immunotherapy as well.

In patients receiving immune checkpoint blockade, for instance, there may be antibodies in the baseline repertoire that correlate with treatment response — or with immune-related adverse events.

So in the future, antibody profiles might help us understand who is likely to respond to treatment, who might be at risk of treatment toxicity, and which immune pathways matter most for a given patient.

The question immunogenetics keeps asking

This paper landed differently for me for a specific reason.

The lab I’m currently in also studies autoantibodies, and the corresponding author of this Commentary, Paul Bastard, along with Jean-Laurent Casanova, are both people directly connected to the lab I’m part of. In a sense, I’m facing the same question again, from where I now stand.

What this paper ultimately asks comes down to one thing: antibodies aren’t just traces of what the body has already been through — they may be variables that shape what happens to a person next.

Before any symptom ever appears, a person’s antibody repertoire may already be shaping their fate with respect to cancer. And within that repertoire, there are antibodies that protect us, and antibodies that make us vulnerable.

Mapping that terrain is the kind of research I want to be doing.

Bastard P, Hulett T, Smith-Byrne K, Landegren N, Mogensen TH, Fellay J, Travis RC, Casanova JL, Dang CV, Lu X. Do autoantibodies shape cancer immunosurveillance? Cell. 2026;189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2026.06.021

1. How to Adapt Quickly in a New Lab

Walking into a new lab, it’s natural to feel like you’re the person who knows the least.

You don’t know who’s working on what, who’s running which experiments, where anything is, or even who to ask.

But the important thing here is not to assume that “I’m new, so someone will eventually walk me through everything.”

I think it matters much more to start thinking, from day one, about how I can actually contribute to this lab.

2. Pay Attention to What Other People Are Researching

Being in the same lab doesn’t mean everyone is working on the same research.

Different people are often chasing completely different questions, and looking into someone else’s work can surface a research interest you never would have thought of on your own.

So whenever I get the chance to have a meeting or a conversation with someone, I try to look into their research beforehand if I can.

What papers have they written, what are they studying now, what did they work on before — I try to know these things going in.

Instead of just asking “what do you work on?”, being able to ask “I saw that you previously worked on X, and now you’re studying Y. How did you make that transition?” completely changes the depth of the conversation.

And on top of that, having clearly done your homework on someone’s research makes a genuinely good first impression.

3. Expose Yourself to as Much Social Interaction as Possible

Personally, this is the hardest one for me.

Reaching out first, starting conversations first, talking about myself first — none of that comes as easily as it sounds in a new environment.

But so much of what you learn in a PhD ends up coming through people.

So early on, I think it’s necessary to deliberately expose myself to as many people as possible.

And this is where the elevator pitch matters.

People can’t give me 30 minutes or an hour of their time.

I can’t give that to them either.

So I need to be able to convey, in a very short window, “who is this person, and what are they interested in?”

Basically, building a small research brand for myself.

I happen to have a somewhat fun personal connection here.

I currently work in a group that studies autoantibodies, and there’s a personal story behind it — when my mother was pregnant with me, an antibody-based treatment called RhoGAM played an important role.

So when I introduce myself, I can tie that story directly into my research interest.

Instead of just saying “I’m interested in autoantibodies,” saying “I’m currently interested in autoantibodies, and there’s actually a personal connection — I wouldn’t be here without an antibody treatment called RhoGAM” is a lot more memorable.

Of course, a personal story like this isn’t necessary in every situation.

But having one hook that helps people remember you turns out to matter more than I expected.

4. So How Should You Read Papers?

Walking into a new lab, you feel this pressure that you need to read an enormous number of papers.

But what I realized in my first month is that deciding what to read matters more than reading a lot.

I’ve been thinking about it in roughly three stages.

5. Finally, How to Make the Most of Rotations

In a US PhD, treating rotations as simply “a period to window-shop labs” wastes a genuinely valuable stretch of time.

And I think the right strategy here depends quite a bit on whether you’ve already been through grad school before.

If you don’t have prior grad school experience

I’d recommend experiencing as many different labs as possible and staying hands-on.

Actually running experiments yourself, and figuring out —

• which techniques you enjoy
• which research questions excite you
• which research environment fits you

— is something you genuinely need to experience directly.

There are things a lab website or a stack of papers simply can’t tell you.

If you already have grad school experience

If you already have some research experience, on the other hand, I think it can be a better strategy to stay more hands-off during rotations — rather than relearning everything from scratch — and instead observe the lab’s overall research direction and scientific environment.

If you’ve already run experiments before, the more important question now may not be “can I do this experiment?” but “what questions can I ask in this lab?”

You’re watching how the PI mentors people, how people discuss and debate with each other, how projects actually develop, and whether this is a place where you can grow in the long run.

Closing Thoughts

The biggest thing I’ve felt in my first month of a US PhD is that there’s no single right answer here.

Nobody hands you a checklist telling you exactly what to do.

So instead, you have to keep asking yourself questions.

What can I contribute to this lab? What don’t I understand about this research yet? What is everyone else working on? What paper should I read next? What question would push this research one step further?

In the end, what I learned this first month wasn’t really research knowledge itself — it was closer to learning how to move on my own as a researcher.

And I’m guessing that by month two, month three, I’ll be learning a different set of things entirely.

So I want to keep recording this, one month at a time — “what I’m newly learning in my US PhD.”

Next month, I’m guessing it’ll be about how to communicate with people.

At a glance

The number looks huge, but more than half of it is money that only went out once — buying a car and moving in. So the real point of this post isn’t this table, it’s the next one.

Recurring vs. One-time — what’s my real “monthly cost of living”?

Going through a month of card statements, I noticed the biggest charges were usually the ones that won’t happen again: $21,500 for the car, $1,231 for move-in setup, $606.94 to fill out my closet, about $1,850 across a couple of flights. Calling any of that “this month’s living cost” felt misleading. So I pulled out only the items that genuinely repeat.

Where my taste actually showed up this month

Once I strip out the unavoidable stuff (car, home, food, utilities), almost everything left that I “didn’t strictly need to spend” fell into two themes: shopping and travel/leisure. A month of card statements turned out to be a pretty honest record of what I actually like and what I don’t mind splurging on.

Wrapping up

One thing became clear after a month here: the big settling-in costs really do disappear, and what actually matters is the $2,919.62 that repeats every month. Even within that number, rent ($1,170.97) and food ($1,166.64) already account for more than half, which confirms that shopping and travel are really the only discretionary levers I have.

And one thing I learned about myself watching this month’s spending: I’m not really someone who tries to trim the essentials — I’m someone who, once something catches my interest (a watch, a flight), commits to it fully. Next month I’ll be watching how deliberately I can manage those two discretionary themes — shopping and travel.

Day 1 — Sep 7 (Mon) · Everyone’s first try is a mess

Every time I glance at the calendar I’m startled. I’m really already here?

Here’s what I tried cooking this week with ingredients I picked up at H Mart last week. 1. Rice, kimchi, and bulgogi. 2. Ribeye steak

One was a success, the other a failure. Warm rice, bulgogi, and kimchi is a combination that’s basically impossible to mess up,

but the steak turned out pretty badly — maybe I picked the wrong cut, or maybe it was just my own inexperience. I guess this is how you learn, one dish at a time.

I also soaked, in the bathtub, a pair of reproduction denim jeans I’d bought in Osaka, Japan.

Raw denim shrinks a lot the first time it’s washed, so to keep the fit from getting distorted, you soak it in the tub in its worn shape for about 30 minutes first — that process is called “soaking.”

And a simple workout to round out the day.

Day 2 — Sep 8 (Tue) · Challenge and failure

Yesterday’s new challenges were cooking and soaking denim. Today’s were the lab and English.

My supervisor, who has been training me, gave me a mission: reproduce the experiment I’d learned entirely on my own. I had the protocol, I had the materials — what could possibly go wrong? So I dove in. The result was brutal.

I’ll get to it later, but I tried the same experiment again on Thursday and Friday and got something close to a success. Does that change the fact that my first attempt ended in failure, though?

…

I’m slowly realizing just how important English is. In one of Tyler’s YouTube videos, he laid out three elements needed to acquire a language: exposure, necessity, and motivation.

Necessity and motivation can be easy to mix up. Say I’m watching something on Netflix in English with English subtitles. I chose to put it on, so my motivation to understand it is plenty high. But whenever a scene is hard to follow, I can just glance at the subtitles — so the necessity is low. (Translation: turn the subtitles off.)

I think I get enough exposure already. So I decided to study harder, treating necessity as “surviving inside an English-speaking culture” and motivation as being able to freely discuss research as a researcher.

To that end, I signed up for English conversation tutoring twice a week — I need to be more proactive about this. I also don’t seem to have enough motivation to study Wordly Wise on my own, so I’m going to have my tutor help me with that too. Each session, we’ll go through whichever words from that week’s list I’m not already comfortable with.

Day 3 — Sep 9 (Wed) · Learning is always new

Discouraged by yesterday’s experiment, I had a hard time focusing on anything today. I never expected to get it right on the first try, but actually facing that result and accepting it turned out to be a different matter entirely.

I noticed this back in my previous lab too — I tend to get distracted pretty easily. So I’ve concluded that when I’m running an experiment, I need to give it my full, undivided attention, and I’m going to try reproducing it again with that in mind. I pulled myself together, went back through the protocol, and vividly simulated in my head exactly how Thursday and Friday would go.

Besides that, today I learned how to use a kit called LegendPlex to detect and quantify several of the cytokines that are the Casanova lab’s main targets. It felt unfamiliar at first, but if I keep chewing on it, before I know it, it’ll feel like it was always mine.

Day 4 - Sep 10 (Thu) · My first exam result

The results came back for the exam I took last week. I scored a little above average — better than I’d worried, honestly. But of course, people never seem to be satisfied that easily. (Or is that just me?)

With a slightly better score I might just barely clear the cutoff for an A, so I’m going to buckle down and prepare for the next exam too.

My supervisor also gave an oral presentation today.

It was a seminar on topographic memory T cells — the idea that the cells making up our body’s immune system are each programmed differently and dispatched to specific organs, where they form a kind of memory immunity for that particular organ. (Seminars come with food more often than not, and this time it was pizza!)

I’m currently testing a hypothesis specifically about the T cells that go to the brain, and if it turns out to be true, I think there could be a real clinical connection — it’s a project I’m genuinely excited about.

And on the way to the gym, it started pouring like crazy out of nowhere. I turned the car around and rushed home, and — of course — the rain stopped the instant I did. Undeterred, I headed back out to the apartment gym and managed to get my workout in after all.

Day 5 - Sep 11 (Fri) · Reproducing the experiment — success?!

Determined to bounce back from Tuesday’s failure, I stayed completely locked into the experiment all day — and as a result, I managed to reproduce it, more or less.

There was some pre-treatment I had to do on Thursday to get ready for today’s run, and the main experiment itself started right after class and didn’t wrap up until just before I left for the day.

It was a genuinely simple experiment, the kind that might be second nature to someone else — but for me, that small success meant more than I can really put into words.

There’s a phrase I’ve been holding onto lately: “To build confidence, build evidence.” My hope is that the evidence of each day I live through — piling up here on this blog and in my lab notebook — will, by the end of my PhD, add up to something enormous, and give me a confidence just as solid.

I closed out the day with a simple walk outside.

There’s a YouTuber named Souljung whose words stuck with me: separate your time into “variable” time and “constant” time.

The world changes so fast, and relationships and communication with other people are caught up in that same whirlwind of “variables.” To build a core of steadiness inside all of that, I’ve decided to carve out “constant” time — time I spend focused only on myself.

Day 6 - Sep 12 (Sat) · Time for the “constant,” clearing my head

The “constant” time from that video was really about building a routine, some part of the day set aside purely for yourself, and I decided to focus specifically on “tidying up.”

That sounds grand when I say it out loud, but really I just let my exhausted body rest and filled the weekend with things I like. After a string of new challenges, I let myself fully enjoy the kind of rest that’s familiar and comfortable to me.

It started with a haircut.

I like haircut time. By the time I need one, my thick hair is practically screaming that there’s no more room left to grow, and some mornings, standing there with the blow dryer forever trying to dry hair that just won’t dry, a wave of exhaustion hits me.

So I like getting a haircut — it lightens up a head that’s gotten heavy. Afterward, I treated myself to a sweet boba, a cup of bubble tea.

And then, shopping!

My plan had two main targets. 1. RRL black-on-black vintage five-pocket jeans 2. Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical, 36mm

Here’s the longer version of why I wanted these.

Soaking my jeans for the first time this past Monday and watching them change was genuinely fun, and it made me want to try a different pair of jeans.

I’ve also been a little skeptical lately, looking back at how I spend on clothes — I make purchase decisions too lightly, and there have been more than a few moments of regretting them afterward.

So I wanted to pay a bit more for a pair of jeans I could actually enjoy watching fade and change over the years, and buying RRL — Ralph Lauren’s own denim line — from the home turf of Polo felt like it would mean something.

And then the watch. The Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical is famous enough that most watch enthusiasts would recognize it. The only watch I’d ever worn was an Apple Watch, so I started poking around out of a desire to widen my world a little.

That’s when I learned the 36mm version had actually been discontinued, and Hamilton was only bringing it back for 2026 — the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 — for this year alone,

and that made me want to grab the chance while it lasted.

And then the shocking discovery:

RRL had so many beautiful pieces that I wanted to take a proper, closer look before committing, and the Khaki Field, meanwhile, is set to arrive next week!

A quick thought on neighborhoods, too. In the US especially, the vibe shifts wildly from one neighborhood to the next.

The place I went shopping was Knox Street, a neighborhood where everyone strolled around peacefully under a warm, pleasant sun.

It was a moment that made me think harder about what kind of environment I want to put myself in.

Day 7 - Sep 13 (Sun) · Netflix House

Today the four of us — a Japanese friend, two Korean friends, and me — spent a fun day together. It started at a Mexican taco place.

Not the kind of taco we usually get back in Korea, stuffed to bursting with a dozen ingredients that spill out the moment you take a bite,

this was the real, authentic Mexican taco, genuinely simple and focused on the essentials — bread on the outside, meat on the inside.

Sometimes simple instinct beats complicated technique.

After that, we debated what to do next and decided to check out Netflix House.

It’s a themed attraction built around various Netflix series, and the one you could actually get in and play was Squid Game. About $50.

It put us right in as actual Squid Game contestants, playing and competing through several of the games ourselves.

Contrary to what I expected, it was staged so realistically that I got completely immersed. Worth experiencing at least once!

The gift shop was selling a huge variety of merchandise, and since I’d really enjoyed watching Stranger Things, a lot of the related merch caught my eye — but I never actually opened my wallet!

Six weeks into the US now, and this is a golden stretch of time for getting a full taste of challenge and failure. I’m sure a day will come when I look back and miss even this. I go into every challenge braced for failure, but actually accepting it when it happens is a whole separate assignment.

This week I made it to the gym three times — Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. And the promise I made to myself about paying more attention to food, I managed to hold up reasonably well too, thanks to some solid Korean food combos. Same with the workouts and the food: neither is a complete success yet, but I believe that if I keep stacking up experience like this, week after week, at some point it will quietly settle into my “constant” territory.

With that in mind, next week I want to talk about my “constants” — the things I want to hold onto, unchanging, because they matter to me.

This week’s entry turned out fairly abstract and personal, but just the act of sitting down and calmly writing out what I’ve been thinking and feeling seems to sort out a lot on its own. And I believe it’ll become a valuable asset someday — something I can pull back out and revisit through these words.

Day 1 — August 31 (Mon) · My First Graduate School Exam

I took my first graduate school exam.

I only realized it had actually happened this past Monday while putting together this week’s schedule. Time really doesn’t wait for anyone… I suppose that just means each week has been full enough to blur together.

An alum from the lab I’m currently rotating in stopped by to visit. She’s doing her postdoc at Harvard’s children’s hospital, researching a rare genetic infectious disease called ‘MIS-C.’ She got her PhD under a PI I’m seriously considering joining, so I really wanted the chance to talk with her.

She turned out to be Korean-French, and spoke Korean quite fluently. I got excited that I’d finally get to hear about research explained in Korean for once — but she said explaining things in Korean actually felt more awkward to her, and switched over to English instead… when in Rome, I suppose.

And my lab seat finally got moved somewhere better! I used to sit right by the door, where a constant creaking sound kept breaking my focus, but now I’m tucked into a corner by the window with a 2021 iMac to go with it — my productivity has doubled, maybe more. And my Big Sib gave me a surprise gift to celebrate my first exam being over… you make my day!

Day 2 — September 1 (Tue) · Worlds?

I’m slowly starting to make international friends I say hi to around campus. Let me tell you about two of them — Rex and Ryoske. I haven’t talked to Rex all that much yet, but he’s super chill and always seems to be deep in thought about something. He also happens to share a huge interest of mine — League of Legends — and thanks to him I found out this year’s Worlds (the League of Legends World Championship) is being held right here in Dallas! (He already invited me to go with him.)

But of course, this is the land of capitalism — tickets that originally sold for around $100 are now going for $400–500 for the good seats. There are some side seats around $250–300… I might have to think it over. I never once considered going even back in Korea, but somehow the fact that it’s happening right here in Dallas makes me want to go. Anyone else know that feeling?

Ryoske is a Japanese friend of mine. He’s a bit unusual — he came from a Computer Science background but wanted to get hands-on with real wet-lab experiments, so he ended up in grad school. The research direction he wants to pursue reminded me of Elon Musk’s ‘Neuralink,’ which I thought was really cool. We’ve gotten pretty close, and now we always sit next to each other in class. We’re also planning to hang out with some other Korean friends on Thursday!

Also, after days of being worn down by footsteps from the upstairs neighbor, I finally ended up writing a note. I feel bad about it, but my precious sleep kept getting interrupted, and on top of adjusting to the lab and speaking English all day, the exhaustion just wasn’t going away… I offered to buy them slippers, and they actually got back to me, so I happily ordered a pair.

And… the slippers have been working perfectly ever since :)

Day 3 — September 2 (Wed) · Getting My SSN

Today the last piece of the paperwork-hell puzzle finally fell into place. Everything I needed to get my Social Security Number (SSN) had finally come together, and after booking this appointment two weeks in advance, I’d been counting down the days to it.

American bureaucracy… you only really understand it once you’ve lived through it. Coming from Korea, the land of speed, made the frustratingly slow process even harder to stomach. Still, getting my driver’s license had built up some tolerance, and once I had my SSN in hand, I’d finally be free from paperwork for a while.

But of course, things didn’t go smoothly. On top of the officially required documents, they also asked for the offer letter from our school. Luckily I had brought every document, so I got mine issued without a hitch — but the friends who came with me to the office didn’t have that letter on hand. They had to track down a nearby place to print it out before they could finally get theirs issued, and since I had a lab meeting, I had to leave them behind and head out first (sorry, guys). It was a bumpy ride right to the end, but in the end, all of us walked away with our SSNs safely in hand.

That evening, I went to the apartment gym for a short strength workout. The night air was cool for the first time in a while, and it felt amazing. So after just 20 minutes of lifting, I spontaneously headed outside and started running for another 20 minutes or so. It wasn’t exactly the best setup — just looping the same route through a parking lot with cars driving through — but running in genuinely cool Dallas weather for the first time put me in a great mood.

Once the weather cools down more, I want to try to make outdoor running a regular thing.

Day 4 - September 4 (Thu) · Hang Out!

Ryoske, three Korean friends, and I went to a pub right in front of our place. The inside was a bit dark, but there was an outdoor patio attached, so we got to enjoy the cool evening air. The menu wasn’t huge, but the quality was great for the price — the beer especially was really good!

I started with a Modelo loaded up with lime, then switched to a pale ale for my second round — a very citrusy American beer.

Day 5 - September 5 (Fri) · A Day Obsessed with Experiments

The lab I was in during my master’s almost always worked with mice, but the lab I’m rotating through here mainly studies humans — so instead of mice, we work with everything from actual patient samples to various human cell lines, and sometimes organoids through collaborations with other labs.

Right now I’ve started culturing T-blast and Jurkat cells, both used to study the characteristics of human T lymphocytes. I’ve been setting up a cell adhesion assay with them, and today I got the chance to use the NovoCyte — a roughly $10k instrument, about 14 million won. It’s a great machine that can run flow cytometry on anything from a 24-well plate up to a 96-well plate in a single run, and it’s especially well suited for cell counting, which is one of the goals of our experiment.

So I was running around all morning to make sure we could use the machine at exactly the right time, and in the end, we got results pretty close to what we expected! In the middle of all the chaos, I was so scattered that I ended up leaving the lab still wearing my lab Crocs.

Day 6 - September 5 (Sat) · Hang Out!!

I had plans to hang out with a new Korean friend that evening. Before that, I made a short run out to catch up on exercise, wash the car, and grab some groceries. The Student Center has a free gym for students, and it’s only about a 5-minute drive from home — but somehow it still takes real willpower to actually go. (Maybe I’m just lazy.) Last week when I went on a weekday evening it was almost completely packed and I didn’t feel like working out at all, but today, being the weekend, I pretty much had the whole place to myself the entire time. I should start coming on weekends more often.

I gave the car a quick wash (outdoor car washes are second nature to me now), and picked up a ribeye to give steak a try. I barely cooked at all back in Korea, so even a simple steak feels like a big challenge to me. Still, thinking long-term, I figure I should gradually build up my cooking repertoire, so I’m going to keep trying things one at a time.

And now, the main event — my second hangout of the week. Today, joined by the two Korean friends I usually hang out with plus one new Korean friend, the four of us had dinner together at a great restaurant. The food was absolutely perfect, but the place was so popular it was nearly full, which made it pretty loud and hard to focus on conversation.

We shared delicious pizza and pasta along with a bunch of sides, and for dessert went to an amazing ice cream place. I picked something like a Peanut Butter flavor and Mango Sticky Rice — both flavors I’d never tried before, and they were genuinely delicious.

Day 7 - September 6 (Sun) · The Odyssey, IMAX 70mm

Today I went to the movies by myself. Back in Korea I loved the whole movie-theater atmosphere and used to go pretty regularly, and there was a movie I desperately wanted to see, so while looking into how to watch it, I impulsively booked an IMAX ticket. And not just any IMAX — the 70mm version, which doesn’t even screen in Korea! The movie was The Odyssey.

To really soak in the theater atmosphere, I bought popcorn and a drink beforehand and headed out. Except, as it turned out, the theater didn’t allow outside food or drinks… So I had no choice but to leave them in the car and buy a fresh popcorn and drink once I got there.

A three-hour movie with no subtitles was rough — okay, really rough. But the cinematography was so beautiful that I genuinely enjoyed it. I’d guess I actually understood maybe a third of what was going on… I clearly overestimated my listening skills. On top of that, IMAX 70mm was popular and the theater was fairly small, so I ended up stuck in the third row from the front — my neck is still stiff. Still, it had been a while since I’d been to a theater, and I had a genuinely great time.

After that, I stopped by H Mart, the Korean grocery store, to pick up more groceries. Lately I’ve mostly been eating frozen stuff from Trader Joe’s, microwaved or air-fried, and I’m starting to get tired of it — plus it doesn’t feel especially healthy — so I’m going to try switching my staples over to Korean food.

For starters, I’m planning to begin with ganjang gyeran-bap (rice topped with a soy-sauce fried egg) and kimchi, then work my way up to bulgogi and daepae samgyeopsal (thinly sliced pork belly). I used to think spending time cooking was a bit of a hassle, and cleaning up afterward even more so, but it seems like an unhealthy eating habit nutritionally, so I want to fix it.

If I keep picking up a taste for this one dish at a time, maybe eventually I’ll be able to throw together a full, healthy Korean spread without even thinking about it.

Five weeks into life in the US, and I’ve even made it through my first exam. Greeting people in the lab has started to feel natural, and with all the paperwork from those first weeks finally settled, I feel a lot lighter.

Everything is hardest the first time you do it. The hard logistical stuff is mostly sorted out now, and I’m slowly building an environment where I can focus more on the actual studying and research.

In the middle of all this, I’d declared last week that I’d start exercising to take better care of myself — but honestly, I didn’t really follow through. I aimed for three times a week but only managed two, on Wednesday and Saturday, and now that the exam’s over, “I was too busy” is really just an excuse. Next week I need to actually stick to working out three times a week.

And next week I’m planning to try cooking steak, bulgogi, and daepae samgyeopsal for dinner, one at a time. It’s a little hard to put real effort into dinner after coming home from the lab, but I figure I just have to keep trying things, one by one, for my own sake. I want to build healthier habits by thinking longer-term about all this.

With that in mind, next week I’m planning to do both an exercise check-in and a review of my eating habits.

Day 1 — August 24 (Mon) · Grad School Rotation Begins

My first grad school rotation began. Here’s roughly what the schedule looks like.

From 8:30–10:00 AM I have Core Curriculum class, and once it’s over I head to the lab for the rest of the day.

On top of that, I had my first exam coming up the following Monday, 8/31.

Anyway, once class ended, it was my first day showing up to the lab. I’d decided to do both of my rotations within the JL Casanova group, and Shen-Ying Zhang — the PI for my second rotation — offered to walk me over personally, so we went together.

For my first rotation, running 8/24–10/12, I’ll be working with Ahmad Yatim on an anti-integrin project. It plays an important role in tissue homing in T cell biology, and since the analysis relies on immunology techniques I’m already familiar with — flow cytometry, MACS, that kind of thing — it felt a bit more approachable.

The one thing I didn’t expect was running flow cytometry on my very first day. A lot happened, but in the end, using frozen human samples, we worked through everything from antibody staining to the gating strategy and managed to optimize the conditions for tomorrow’s experiment.

Day 2 — August 25 (Tue) · A Hectic Rotation

Leave the apartment, go to class, then head over to the lab in the same building — my daily routine has gotten almost absurdly simple. On the way out this morning, though, I spotted a creature wandering around the apartment complex, so here’s a record of that.

Another frantic day of experiments. (Honestly, “watching” is probably the more accurate word.) We get healthy donor blood from UTSW and isolate PBMCs from it via density-gradient centrifugation using Ficoll. What we’ll actually be doing is staining these PBMCs with the right antibodies to pull out the cell phenotypes we want, then analyzing the genome and proteome of each population.

Since the project just started, I can’t go into detail, but here’s an analogy: if a whole pizza represents all of human blood, our strategy is to pick out just the pepperoni, the peppers, and the onions from the pizza and dig deeper into the individual characteristics of each.

Anyway, after finishing up and getting home, I was lying around and thought of my nephew. He has no idea I’m out here struggling with English. He’s been really into Pokémon lately, always looking things up — I think I’ll get him this thick English-language Pokémon book as a gift.

Day 3 — August 26 (Wed) · A Successful Sorting Run

Thanks to the gating strategy we’d set up on Monday — basically, the plan for how to pick the pepperoni, onions, and peppers off the pizza — we were able to sort them out cleanly.

We used a sorter called the Aurora, which can detect over 40 multi-channels — meaning it can separate out 40 different pizza toppings based on each one’s individual characteristics. It’s basically a pizza expert. To sort out the cells we actually wanted, we stained them with a 17-color panel (meaning we threw together a rough pizza using just 17 toppings).

The results were a real success. Usually, the more complex a gating strategy is, the lower the yield tends to be, but this time the sorting efficiency came in at close to 80–90%, giving us a large number of cells.

Day 4 - August 27 (Thu) · The Lee Sang-joon Show!

One of my close Korean friends mentioned that his uncle, who lives out west, runs a coffee business. He told me to let him know anytime I needed coffee — and of course, I said I definitely needed coffee!

As a result, I received an absolutely ridiculous amount of Kanu (a Korean instant coffee mix). I’d been rationing a 30-pack I bought at H-Mart for $20, so this friend is a genuine lifesaver. Looks like I won’t have to worry about coffee for a while.

Anyway, today was finally the day of the Lee Sang-joon show. It was held at the Charles W. Eisemann Center, a genuinely upscale venue, and our seats were closer than I expected, so I enjoyed it a lot. When Lee Sang-joon first came out, he was wearing a Texas cowboy hat someone had given him, and he joked that nobody in the audience was wearing one — which cracked me up. I’ll skip the rest of the details.

But at one point, in a similar vein, he brought up Trader Joe’s bags — half-joking, half-annoyed that nobody in the audience had brought one — and right then, the person sitting immediately to our left suddenly held up her own Trader Joe’s bag and shouted, “Right here!” A cameraman caught the seat right next to us in an instant, so for a brief moment, we were on the broadcast.

At one point, he calmly shared that he’d grown up raised by a single mother, and it made me imagine what kind of hardship might have been behind the scenes of his life. (Of course, he may well have had a perfectly fine time with none of that.) Still, thinking about everything he must have had to overcome — both the social stigma and the practical difficulties — to end up here, confidently running a nationwide tour at 45, I quietly applauded him in my head.

Since I hadn’t eaten a proper dinner, before heading home I stopped for a bowl of pho — and polished it off, kimchi and all.

Day 5 - August 28 (Fri) · Juggling Exam Prep and Lab Life

Today a new postdoc candidate visited the lab, and we sat in on their talk and had a meal together. They gave a roughly 45-minute lecture on their research at 10:30, followed by lunch together. After that, they spent 30 minutes to an hour with small groups, chatting briefly with every member of the lab, and the day wrapped up with dinner alongside the lab head and a few postdocs.

Afterward, an email went out to everyone in the lab — a survey asking for our honest assessment of whether we thought this candidate would be a good fit, and whether we thought they should join the lab.

That email gave me a lot to think about. I hadn’t really talked with the candidate directly, so I just answered the survey with something reasonably positive and moved on — but it hit me that the moment my own rotation ends, the exact same kind of survey is going to go out about me. My head got a little tangled up over that. Still, I need to sit with that anxiety and just make sure I show my best self.

I’ll just do my best not to leave any regrets in my choices, and accept whatever comes of it.

To put this anxiety to rest, I booked myself a flight to Cancún and went to sleep.

Day 6 - August 29 (Sat) · New Hobby: Car Washing?!

Today is two days before the exam. Even the most boring daily routine somehow turns fun right before an exam.

Car washing was no exception.

The first time I washed my car, I remember being irritated, wondering why on earth I had to be out there scrubbing a car in this heat. Today was the second time — ($9.99 gets you unlimited washes for a month!) — and for some reason, I actually enjoyed every minute of it.

Watching the ugly grime and stains rinse cleanly away gave me a weirdly satisfying thrill. My apartment only has an outdoor parking lot, so the car gets covered in dust almost immediately — but thinking of this as keeping it properly maintained made the whole thing feel worthwhile.

I guess it really is all about mindset.

Day 7 - August 30 (Sun) · Studying at an American Starbucks

Today is the day before the exam. Back in Korea, I always used to study at cafés whenever I had a test coming up, but apparently studying at cafés isn’t really a thing here in the US. Still, I’d noticed people at the Starbucks near my place always had their laptops open working, so I decided to give café-studying a shot.

I can whip up an iced Americano for myself at home without any trouble these days, so I decided to try something I could only get at Starbucks. I ordered a pumpkin matcha latte — knew nothing about it going in, just picked it because it was new — and it turned out to be pretty good.

After that, since it was an open-book exam, I put real effort into making a summary sheet. I cracked the whip on ChatGPT — my friends and I call this “채찍피티,” a pun on 채찍 (whip) and GPT — and ended up with a genuinely solid set of notes. It used to take a long, painful process: typing everything out by hand, organizing it, revising draft after draft. Now I just upload the lecture slides, say “do it for me,” and it’s all organized in seconds.

I’m honestly curious what the future of humanity is going to look like.

It’s week four in the US — somehow it’s already been a month. It’s only now starting to really sink in that I’m actually living here. Up until last week, it was more like a taste of classes; this week, with lab life added on top, it was genuinely, literally an insanely busy week. But I think having this kind of gradual “damper” period to adjust bit by bit is what’s letting me keep up at all.

Going forward, I want to hold onto this rhythm so I can keep adjusting well. Oh, and there’s one important change: I used to get hit with brutal, overwhelming drowsiness every day around 1–2 PM, from my brain overloading on all the English input — and that doesn’t happen anymore! I guess humans really are creatures of adaptation.

And last week, I couldn’t follow a conversation at all unless it was strictly one-on-one, but after spending time with people in the lab, I can now more or less keep up when it’s a group of three, including me. Granted, that mostly means reacting and tossing in the occasional short phrase, but it’s still a huge step forward.

If nothing else, to survive in the lab, I need to get comfortable with English faster and adjust to this environment. That wraps up my one-month check-in. Next week’s goal is to consistently add exercise to my routine. I’ll try to record in more detail next week exactly how much and how I actually worked out.

At a glance

1. Vehicle

This is by far the biggest item in my two-week spending. Broken down, it splits into three parts.

I already covered the purchase price and tax in detail in my used car buying writeup, from the PPI to registration. In Texas, even a private-party sale gets taxed 6.25% of the vehicle’s value, paid in cash or by card at the Tax Office when you register — so you need to have that extra chunk of money ready on top of the purchase price itself.

Here’s how I picked insurance. Before you can apply for a Transit Permit, you need insurance in your own name to legally drive. I requested quotes online from three insurers — each one asked for roughly the same information (VIN, driver’s license, US address, prior driving history), so each quote only took about 10–15 minutes to get. I expected my premiums to run high across the board as an international student with no US driving history, and that turned out to be true — but I was surprised by how much the quotes varied between companies. I compared all three and went with Progressive, the cheapest of the three, prepaying the full six months of coverage — $1,433.50 — up front.

2. Home

This $1,184.06 over two weeks doesn’t include rent — it’s purely the cost of filling an empty apartment. Instead of buying new, I got the sofa used off Facebook Marketplace (the same sofa I mention in my used car buying writeup, the one I rented that U-Haul van to move), then filled in a desk plus storage and household items from IKEA.

Rent itself is broken out separately below, under “Estimated recurring monthly costs.” Early on, the initial setup cost can actually feel bigger than rent — the difference is that this isn’t a monthly recurring expense, it’s a lump sum you pay once and you’re done.

3. Food

I spent $466.79 over two weeks — I barely cooked and mostly ate out or ordered delivery, so scaled up to 30 days that comes out to roughly $1,077.21/month. The moment US restaurant prices really hit me was at First Watch, when a coffee and a couple of menu items came out to almost $30. I expect this number to come down naturally once I start leaning more on Trader Joe’s and H Mart for groceries.

4. Shopping/Personal

At $1,010.64, this is the second-biggest item after the vehicle. It’s mostly small essentials that added up — “oh, I don’t have this either” trips to Daiso and Target — plus clothing and sneaker shopping (Alo, REI, Vuori, Nike). Each individual purchase was only a few dollars to a few tens of dollars and didn’t feel like much at the time, but added together it turned out to be about the same size as the home setup costs in item 2.

5. Travel/Leisure

At $405.80, this is a relatively small item — it covers a flight and some minor entertainment. It also includes a weekend trip out to watch the longhorn cattle at the Fort Worth Stockyards and grab dinner from the Goldee’s BBQ truck. None of it was essential — it was mostly stress relief from settling in — but this category can grow fast the moment visitors show up or travel plans start forming, so I plan to keep tracking it separately.

6. Subscriptions/Utilities

At $37.55 in actual two-week spend, this is the smallest item — but it’s only going to grow. Once utilities like electricity and internet start billing properly, they’ll add their own line items; for now I’ve estimated electricity at around $60/month.

Estimated Recurring Monthly Costs

Based on two weeks of actual spending, here’s my estimate of the recurring costs I expect to pay every month going forward.

Wrapping up

Before I actually looked at the numbers, all I really knew was “I heard the US is expensive.” Breaking it down by theme made where the money actually goes a lot clearer. Especially early on, if you don’t separate “money that goes out every month” from “money that only goes out once,” the cost of living can feel a lot scarier than it really is. The $2,589.44/month figure I’ve landed on here is still an estimate based on just two weeks of data, so I plan to update it against real bills after another month or two.

Day 1 — August 17 (Mon) · Grad School Classes Officially Begin

My first real grad school class started today. The core curriculum kicks off with Proteins, followed by seven weeks each of Cells and Genes. After a short course overview, the Proteins class dove straight into the 20 amino acids, their individual properties, and some basic protein analysis methods.

In the afternoon I took a mouse safety class. I still don’t know whether I’ll end up doing animal work, but mouse studies make up a pretty big chunk of immunology — the field I’m hoping to go into — so I figured I’d get it out of the way early.

Later, catching up with friends back in Korea, the movie Odyssey came up. One friend said it was so good she went back to see it two or three times, and that was enough to make me want to catch it in IMAX. Digging around, I found out there’s an actual IMAX 70mm theater near Dallas. After refreshing the seat map more times than I’d like to admit, I managed to snag a seat in the third row — not the best spot, but a seat all the same.

I’m honestly not sure I can follow three hours of unsubtitled English when everyday conversation still trips me up. But nothing to lose by trying, right? Just getting to watch true IMAX 70mm here in the US feels like a rare opportunity on its own. It’s scheduled for Sunday, September 6th, so a review might show up around two posts from now.

It’s also been about two weeks since I landed in Dallas, so I sat down and tallied up exactly how much I’ve spent so far. Between eating out with friends every week and not having my kitchen fully set up yet — which pushes the dining-out ratio way up — I was relieved to see the number wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.

Going forward I want to keep a closer eye on spending, and maybe start studying up on personal finance here and there, with some vague target dollar amount in mind for when I finish the PhD.

Day 2 — August 18 (Tue) · Did My US License Actually Come Through?!

I’ve been suffering through the Texas license process for what feels like forever, endlessly refreshing my case number to see if anything was moving. And then, out of nowhere, my case status actually changed! (See Day 1 of my last post, Week 2 in the US — Orientation and Furnishing an Apartment)

Whenever something like this happens, my rule after two weeks here has become: drop everything and go handle it in person, on-site.

And it worked out perfectly.

Turns out the holdup was that I hadn’t yet been registered in SAVE, a verification program run by US immigration, so the Texas DPS (Department of Public Safety) couldn’t confirm my identity either. Now that two weeks have passed since I entered the country, the system was finally able to verify me properly, and I got my Texas license approved at last.

I don’t have the physical card yet, but they said it’ll arrive by mail within a week, so I’ll just wait it out. One catch — since this counted as an “exchange,” I had to surrender my Korean license.

…

And on top of that, my long-awaited ON running shoes finally arrived. (?!)

The pair I got was the Cloudmonster 3 — a solid daily all-rounder. I used to run in New Balance 1080v14s, but a baggage-space issue (…) meant I couldn’t bring them with me to the US, so these are the replacement.

Maybe it was the long wait, but I was genuinely thrilled. That excitement lasted about five seconds before I started second-guessing the price when I looked closely at the finish. That doubt disappeared completely the moment I put them on and took a few steps. I’m going to put a lot of miles on these across this big country.

Day 3 — August 19 (Wed) · Hunting for Free Lunch

Grad school life sometimes lands you in that awkward lunch spot — not really worth going home, but also not free enough to just relax, since there’s something on campus in the afternoon. Today was one of those days. I had two deep conversations lined up in the afternoon, one with a professor and one with a postdoc, both about upcoming rotations.

Classes always run from 8:30 to 10 in the morning. Once they wrap at 10, starting next week I’ll officially belong to a lab for my first rotation. Students can do up to five rotations, with a minimum of two required and three recommended.

Anyway, thanks to this scheduling gap, campus events are a great way to grab a Free Lunch! and solve the meal problem cheaply.

I wandered into the shiny Biomedical Engineering (BME) building for an event aimed at BME students. Even though I’m not in that program, grad school here is pretty open about this kind of thing, and students from other programs are welcome too. I filled up on free lunch bagels and then headed off to my afternoon rotation meeting.

I’ve decided to do my rotation with Jean-Laurent Casanova — a name I definitely mangled before I could say it smoothly — in a lab doing world-class infectious disease genetics research. There’s a longer story behind how I landed here, but the short version is that he spent about 20 years at Rockefeller University in New York City before moving to UTSW this past July(?!). His research lines up closely with what I want to study, so this rotation felt like a genuinely great opportunity. (Lab website: HGID (Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases))

As they say, life is seventy percent luck and thirty percent effort.

I also picked up a few supplements. The supplement and vitamin market here is way more developed than in Korea — there’s an overwhelming number of products with genuinely good formulations, so after a lot of deliberating over what combination to get, here’s where I landed.

Top priority was omega-3, then magnesium, then probiotics, then a multivitamin (B, D, and so on). There are enough well-established go-to brands that I could get good prices on all of them. Next time I visit Korea, I should stock up on a huge haul of supplements to bring back.

On top of that, I grabbed some protein powder and creatine to look after my small but precious muscles.

Day 4 - August 20 (Thu) · Making a Japanese Friend

Back at orientation, I’d briefly crossed paths with a Japanese classmate named Ryosuke. He finished undergrad in Japan, spent about a year in NYC as a research assistant, and then got into the same PhD program here in Texas.

I think, in North America especially, friends from other parts of Asia end up feeling more familiar somehow. He’s from Yokohama, so I pulled out photos from my last trip to Tokyo — including Yokohama — and we ended up chatting for a while over them. He mentioned wanting to move to Med Park, where I live, next year, so I told him I’d help him find a place when the time comes.

Anyway, we hit it off talking about this and that, grabbed lunch together, and then headed to the student lounge for capsule coffee, where a bunch of us international students kept practicing our not-quite-there English.

Day 5 - August 21 (Fri) · Meet the GDD

Another day of finishing class and then having somewhere to be on campus. At 10:15 there was a Student Advisory Committee (SAC) meeting — an hour-long, genuinely useful session with faculty who advise students on picking rotation labs and navigating the PhD in general.

After that, at noon, there was a session called Meet the GDD Program. My program admits students into the Basic Biomedical Sciences umbrella, and you choose a specific track in your second year — GDD stands for Genetics, Development and Disease.

I’d already more or less made up my mind on Immunology, but I went anyway, curious how the other programs differed. There was pizza and drinks, so I got to eat while picking up useful info about the program. The advice that stuck with me most was about how to actually choose: after picking a program, you attend a weekly journal-club-style session called WIPS, so the real question is which topics you want to become more fluent in through that kind of recurring exposure.

GDD is genuinely appealing, but it also covers a lot of ground — probably too much for me to carve out something sharp and specific during my PhD. I quietly settled on the answer that Immunology was still the better fit for me.

Day 6 - August 22 (Sat) · Goldee’s BBQ and a Stockyards Outing

Today was a genuinely historic day — we finally went to Goldee’s BBQ! It’s ranked #1 (2022) and #3 (2026) in Texas Monthly’s famous statewide list, which only updates every four years, and the even crazier part is that it’s only open Friday through Sunday, 11am to 3pm. Given the line that builds up starting in the morning, there’s a real chance they sell out of food by 1 or 2pm.

To have any shot at this place, my Korean friends and I put our heads together and settled on the extreme plan of leaving at 8am. And after eating, we had the ambitious follow-up plan of catching the longhorn show at the Stockyards.

Wow. Terry Black’s, the BBQ place I’d been to before, turns out to have been fake BBQ this whole time (sorry, Terry’s). The brisket fell apart the second a fork touched it, impossibly tender, with deep smoky flavor running all the way through. This is a place where describing it in words feels almost insulting — you just have to go taste it yourself. I haven’t tried every BBQ joint in Texas, but if family or friends ever visit from out of town, this is almost certainly the first place I’d take them. After hitting peak carnivore at the height of extreme meat-eating, we capped it off with an absurdly sweet-and-salty banana pudding for dessert — a genuinely satisfying Texas BBQ experience from start to finish.

…

Next we headed to the Stockyards for the longhorn show. But then came a bolt out of the blue — the afternoon longhorn show had been canceled because of this week’s heat wave..! A little disappointed, we settled for watching the resting longhorns from a distance, admired a whole lot of impressive cowboy hats, and headed home.

Day 7 - August 23 (Sun) · The Furniture Assembly That Never Ends

Today the truly, actually, finally last piece of furniture arrived — a shoe rack. I’d been putting off ordering it for a while, worn down from all the furniture assembly, but I finally couldn’t delay any longer and ordered this last (please, let it be last) piece. The top surface doubles as a seat, which sold me on it — should make it much easier to sit down and put shoes on and off.

At this point, assembling furniture this size takes me almost no time at all.

After that, I headed over to the campus gym. I’d always worked out at my apartment’s gym, but lately it’s been cramped with three or four people crammed into that small space, and the environment just wasn’t great anymore. So I figured I’d finally check out the campus gym, which is free to use.

I’d caught a glimpse of it from a distance during orientation and assumed it was just an ordinary gym. Actually going and experiencing it up close was a completely different story. Everything was Hammer Strength, with around 20 machines covering pretty much all the essentials. There were three full racks, and big screens set up in front of the treadmills, which made it look great for cardio too. With facilities like this, I think I could happily spend the next 5-6 years of my PhD working out here — and all for free!

It’s already been three weeks since I landed in the US. At the end of my next post, I’m planning to write a short final wrap-up on my first month living here. And I really hope I can throw myself into rotations and land in a lab I’m excited about.

A disease where the warts never go away

There’s a rare genetic disorder called epidermodysplasia verruciformis (EV). In EV, the body can’t control β-HPV — a group of HPV types that live harmlessly on most people’s skin — so flat warts spread across the body and never clear, for life. Roughly half of patients eventually develop skin cancer in sun-exposed areas as they age.

What’s striking is that, aside from the warts and skin cancer, these patients are otherwise generally healthy. They’re not unusually susceptible to other infections. In other words, this doesn’t look like a global immune system failure — it looks like one narrow function, specifically the control of skin-resident viruses, has gone missing.

Yet for nearly half of EV patients, the causal gene is still unknown. A team sequenced the genomes of 62 EV families from Algeria, Iran, and elsewhere, and among 40 previously unsolved families, found shared variants in the same gene in four of them: ITGAL, which encodes integrin αL (CD11a).

LFA-1: the adhesion protein every leukocyte carries

The αL protein made by ITGAL pairs with β2 (CD18) to form the integrin LFA-1 (lymphocyte function-associated antigen 1) — essentially the “glue” leukocytes use on their surface to grip ICAM proteins on the vessel wall.

LFA-1 isn’t the property of any one cell type. T cells, B cells, NK cells, monocytes, dendritic cells — nearly every leukocyte carries it. It was already known to be involved both when T cells exit blood vessels into tissue and when T cells form an “immune synapse” with antigen-presenting cells. In short, it’s a versatile, seemingly indispensable protein.

The team confirmed with cell experiments that the patients’ αL variants actually break protein function. When the mutant αL was expressed in HEK293T, HeLa, and Jurkat cells, all three variants resulted in LFA-1 failing to appear on the cell surface at all. ICAM-1 binding, cell-cell aggregation, and migration were all completely lost. By contrast, 34 other common αL variants found in the general population mostly had no effect on function — meaning a fully broken LFA-1 is exceedingly rare across the population (roughly 1 in 1.22 million people).

In the patients’ actual blood cells, LFA-1 was undetectable as well. This was the first reported case in humans of a complete, selective LFA-1 deficiency.

And yet everything else was fine

This is where the paper gets genuinely interesting.

If LFA-1 is as central to immune synapse formation and leukocyte trafficking as the literature suggests, shouldn’t someone missing it entirely show a much more severe immunodeficiency? In practice, that’s not what happened.

• Leukocyte subsets and their distribution looked essentially normal even under detailed CyTOF and CITE-seq profiling.
• T cell differentiation, TCR repertoire diversity, and cytokine production were all normal.
• Interaction with antigen-presenting cells (allogeneic T cell responses) proceeded normally even without LFA-1.
• Neutrophils had no trouble migrating to sites of inflammation despite lacking LFA-1 entirely — other β2 integrins (Mac-1, αXβ2) simply took over.
• Antibody responses to HPV formed normally too — humoral immunity was intact.

In other words, even without LFA-1, the body had detour routes for almost everything. The one place with no detour was the skin.

There was only one door into the skin

Leukocytes generally rely on two integrin families to move from blood vessels into tissue: the α4 family (VLA-4, α4β7) and the β2 family (LFA-1, Mac-1, αXβ2). When the team examined healthy human leukocytes in detail, they found that most leukocytes carry at least one integrin from each family, overlapping. So if one door is blocked, another is available.

There were two exceptions: neutrophils, and skin-homing memory T cells (CLA⁺ cells). Both of these populations lack α4-family integrins entirely and depend solely on the β2 family — specifically, on LFA-1. Experimentally, skin-homing T cells bound only to ICAM-1, and did not respond to VCAM-1 or MAdCAM-1, the adhesion molecules used by T cells homing to other tissues.

In patients lacking LFA-1, these skin-homing T cells weren’t gone — they were stuck in the blood. Cells that should normally circulate between skin and blood had nowhere to go, because the door into the skin simply didn’t exist, so they piled up in circulation instead. Indeed, the proportion of skin-homing T cells in patients’ blood was four times higher than in controls.

The team confirmed this directly with skin biopsies. Healthy skin contained an average of 524 T cells per mm², while patients’ skin had only 103. Calculating the ratio of skin-specific T cells between blood and skin, healthy individuals showed roughly 1:2 (favoring the skin), while patients exceeded 20:1 — cells that should have been in place were instead adrift in the bloodstream.

Why this matters

What this study shows isn’t just the narrow fact that “LFA-1 is needed for skin immunity.” It points to a more general principle.

An infection localized to one organ doesn’t necessarily mean that organ’s own defenses are weak. These patients’ T cells were fine — proliferation, cytokine production, antigen recognition, all normal. The problem was purely a traffic jam: the right cells simply couldn’t get to where they were needed. The authors call this a “lacunar” defect in tissue-specific immunity — a problem of cell trafficking, not cell capability.

There’s also an interesting clinical thread here. Efalizumab, an anti-LFA-1 antibody drug used to treat psoriasis between 2004 and 2009, caused HPV skin lesions similar to what’s seen in these patients — a case where genetic deficiency and pharmacological blockade converged on the same outcome. That drug was eventually pulled from the market, though, because of a far more serious side effect: JC virus encephalitis (PML). The authors suggest this difference may arise because the drug does more than just block LFA-1 binding — it may also deliver an additional inhibitory signal. The fact that a genetic “complete deficiency” and a drug-induced “functional block” don’t always produce identical outcomes is itself a useful lesson for drug development.

A researcher’s take

This paper is a good showcase of the approach characteristic of the Casanova lab. Rather than studying one or two patients with a rare genetic disease, they gather multiple families with similar symptoms and use naturally occurring “human gene knockouts” to work backward toward what a gene is actually required for. It’s a way of generating direct evidence about human immunity that a mouse model simply can’t provide.

What I personally found most interesting is that the intuition “a highly expressed protein must be important everywhere” turns out to be wrong here. LFA-1 is present on nearly every leukocyte, yet the one place it turned out to be truly irreplaceable was a single route: T cell trafficking into skin. Everywhere else, some other integrin was standing by as backup.

Knowing how — and on what — immune cells depend to reach each tissue is, in the end, part of the map needed to answer a bigger question: why is this particular organ vulnerable to this particular infection. This paper is a reminder of just how much of that map is still blank.

Yatim A, Youssefian L, Idani A, et al. Human LFA-1 governs T cell immune surveillance of the skin. Sci Immunol. 2026;11(116):eadz8360.

How I judged the price

The most confusing part of a private-party deal was figuring out “what’s a fair price here.” I learned pretty quickly that you can’t judge it off a single number.

These three numbers represent different things, so you can’t just compare them directly. Paying more than the CARFAX value doesn’t automatically mean I got ripped off — so instead I weighed these five things together:

1. Actual asking prices for similar year/trim/mileage listings
2. Value guides like CARFAX/KBB
3. Dealer buy offers (CarMax offer)
4. Accident, ownership, and title history
5. Recent maintenance and the condition of wear items

In the end, it wasn’t so much “I got a deal” as “I paid a bit more, but for a car with solid condition and a documented service history.”

For reference, I checked the original window sticker (Monroney Label) from when the car was new — MSRP was $32,300, and with dealer-installed options (floor mats, cargo net, cargo tray, cargo cover, mud guards, bumper appliqué, wheel locks) the total came to $34,340. Over 74k miles, it had lost about 40% of its value ($20,200 ÷ $34,340 ≈ 59%).

The overall process

Step 1. Pulling the CARFAX report

I bought a CARFAX report for $40 to check the accident history and ownership history. Here’s what I looked for:

• Accident/damage — accident or damage records, structural damage, whether the airbags had deployed
• Title — any salvage, rebuilt, flood, or other title issues
• Odometer — rollback or inconsistencies in mileage
• Ownership — number of owners and how long each held it
• Service history — actual maintenance records for oil, tires, brakes, filters, etc.
• Open recall — any unresolved recalls
• Location — possible exposure to flooding, road salt, or other environmental factors

This car came back clean: no accidents, no structural damage, airbags never deployed, no mileage discrepancies, no title issues (this is what’s called a clean title), two private owners, and several real service records on file — all of which I took as a good sign.

Step 2. PPI (Pre-Purchase Inspection)

Before heading out for the PPI, I grabbed a quick breakfast, and when I looked at the receipt while paying, I had to pause for a second. I’d ordered just a coffee and a couple of items, and it came to almost $30. It was one of those moments where the cost of eating out really hit me.

A seller saying “it’s in great shape” and a mechanic actually confirming that are two different things. The standard practice is to have an independent shop with no ties to the seller do the inspection, at the buyer’s expense. It cost $150, and at 74,532 miles, they checked the following:

The lift inspection, leak check, suspension, tires, brakes, and system scan all came back GOOD.

Step 3. Test drive

Separately from the PPI, I drove it myself and checked the following:

Step 4. Pre-deal checks, payment, and the Bill of Sale

Before handing over any money, I checked three things first. These are the most basic steps for avoiding fraud in a private-party deal.

• Seller’s identity — the owner’s name on the Title matches the seller’s ID
• Matching VIN — the VIN is the same on the Title, the car itself (bottom of the windshield and driver’s door), and the CARFAX report
• Liens — no lienholder (lender) is listed on the Title. If one is, you need a lien release showing the loan has been paid off

I put down a $500 deposit first to hold the car. After that, I paid the remaining $19,700 of the $20,200 total as a cashier’s check. In private-party deals, sellers are often uncomfortable accepting a stack of cash, so a cashier’s check is the standard way to pay. After payment, the seller and I met at a nearby coffee shop and filled out a Bill of Sale together. It’s a simple document with the transaction amount, vehicle information, and both signatures — it’s easiest to just print a standard template from the internet ahead of time.

Step 5. Signed title transfer + Form 130-U

After the Bill of Sale was done, I received the Title. The seller had already filled in and signed the seller section on the back of the title.

At the same time, we also filled out Form 130-U (Application for Texas Title and/or Registration). This form needs to be signed by both the seller and the buyer, so if you don’t get it done while you’re with the seller, you’ll have to track them down again later. You can print it from the TxDMV website ahead of time.

Step 6. Getting insurance

Before applying for a Transit Permit, you need insurance in your own name to legally drive the car. I got quotes from three insurers and went with Progressive, which came out cheapest.

Step 7. Applying for a Transit Permit

In Texas, plates generally stay with the car, but in a private-party sale the seller is allowed to remove the plates and the registration sticker. My seller took the front and rear plates and the windshield sticker with them.

Since I needed to drive the car without plates, I applied for a Transit Permit. It lets you legally drive without plates for 5 days.

Step 8. Visiting the Tax Office — registration and paying the tax

After that, I went to the Tax Office by myself to finish registration. Here’s what I brought:

• The Title from the seller
• Form 130-U, signed by both parties
• My Passport, for ID
• Proof of insurance (insurance card)
• A way to pay the tax and fees

The 6.25% tax is charged on whichever is higher: the actual sale price or 80% of the SPV (Standard Presumptive Value). Even if you report a price below market, you’ll be taxed on the SPV, so if you got the car very cheaply, it’s worth calculating the tax ahead of time. In my case the sale price was higher, so I paid $20,200 × 6.25% = $1,262.50.

Once the process was done, I got a Texas license plate and a registration sticker on the spot (Texas uses a “Two Steps, One Sticker” system, so there’s just one windshield sticker), and finally a registration receipt, and with that, registration was complete.

The odometer read 74,607 miles. Not far off from the 74,532 miles at the PPI, the car officially became mine.

Post-purchase checklist

Once registration was done, I put together this checklist:

• Keep the Title / registration receipt / Form 130-U / Bill of Sale
• Keep the maintenance receipts, CARFAX, and PPI report I got from the seller
• Keep the insurance card in the car
• Record the current mileage and the mileage at the last oil change
• Record tire DOT codes and tread depth
• Record brake pad/rotor condition
• Put upcoming maintenance on a calendar by mileage

Wrapping up

The process felt simpler than going through a dealer, but there was a lot more I had to verify myself. Validating the car’s condition through CARFAX and the PPI, and — while I was with the seller — checking their ID, the VIN, and liens, plus the Title and 130-U signatures, mattered especially. From payment to registration, the whole thing wrapped up within a day or two. If I’d bought a car in similar shape from a dealer, there would have been dealer fees and markup on top, so even though I paid a bit over market value, I think the overall cost was reasonable.

Tax and paperwork requirements can vary a bit by county, so it’s worth double-checking what your local Tax Office requires before you go.

My maintenance and ownership plan going forward

As of purchase (roughly 75,000 miles, 2.5L GDI, FWD), I put together the following maintenance plan. All four tires and the brake pads were replaced at 53,146 miles, and the service records show an oil change around 69k miles (around March 2026). With a 5,000–6,000 mile oil-change interval, the first oil change is due right now.

Hyundai’s 10-year/100,000-mile powertrain warranty only applies to the original owner; from the second owner on, it drops to 5 years/60,000 miles. This car is already past that, so I budgeted a generous buffer below.

From 75k to 150k, I’m budgeting roughly $3,000–5,250 for normal maintenance, and conservatively $4,500–7,500 once I add a buffer for unexpected repairs.

Separately from the maintenance plan, I also decided ahead of time roughly “how long I plan to keep this car.” I compared three points: 2 years (2028, ~95k), 6 years (2032, ~150k), and 10 years (2036, ~200k).

I decided the criteria not by mileage, but by type of cost. I’m excluding routine maintenance — oil, filters, tire rotations, spark plugs, coolant, normal tire/brake replacement — from the sell/keep decision entirely. Instead, I’m only weighing unexpected repairs — engine, transmission, AC compressor, major electrical problems, wheel bearings, CV axles, or big suspension/cooling-system repairs.

• Under $3,000 in cumulative unexpected repairs → just keep driving it
• $3,000–5,000 → generally keep driving it
• $5,000–7,000 → weigh the car’s condition against future costs
• $7,000+, or a major repair at the engine/transmission level → seriously consider selling

I concluded that hitting 100,000 miles isn’t, by itself, a reason to sell a car still worth over $15,000. So I’ve set 6 years/150k as my first checkpoint, and at that point I’ll look at how much I’ve spent on unexpected repairs and decide whether to push on to 200k or sell. I’m keeping 2 years/95k as a safe exit if I ever want to trade up sooner, and 10 years/200k as the plan if the car keeps holding up well and I decide to run it all the way out.

Day 1 — August 10 (Mon) · Driver’s License and Decorating the Apartment

First thing in the morning, I went to the Texas DPS (Department of Public Safety) to apply for my driver’s license. The weather forecast on the waiting-room screen showed 100°F (about 38°C) straight through Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Texas summers are not messing around.

There was a hiccup with the license process: my name couldn’t be verified in SAVE, the immigration-run system that confirms entry status. So after all the trouble of booking an appointment and showing up, I couldn’t actually exchange my license at the DPS that day — I was told to wait for a physical letter from immigration in the mail and come back again later. (Oh my god.)

Lunch was Chick-fil-A again. I’d had it last week too, and their freshly-fried waffle fries were so good I went back for more. Last time I ate comfortably indoors, but the location near the DPS only had outdoor seating, so I wolfed it down before the heat got to me. This time I got the Deluxe version instead of the plain Original — lettuce, cheese, the works — and it tasted better to me, probably because it’s closer to the kind of burger Koreans are used to.

And the debit card I’d requested from Chase last week finally arrived in the mail. I’d already added it to Apple Pay and had been using it fine, but every once in a while — like at the tax office paying the 6.25% vehicle registration tax — Apple Pay just wouldn’t work. (That day I ended up going back to the bank to withdraw cash and making a second trip to the tax office just to pay it…)

So I was genuinely happy to finally get the physical card. I’d gone back and forth on whether to pick the Disney card design, worried it might look a little childish, but in person it looked much cleaner and nicer than I expected.

Next on the agenda was buying a used sofa. I’d tried out a bunch of options at IKEA and was torn between the SÖDERHAMN and the KIVIK, but paying somewhere between $800 and $1,000 for a brand-new one made me hesitate. Then I spotted a sofa from West Elm, the New York furniture brand, going for about $150 on Facebook Marketplace, and decided to go see it in person.

It was in better shape than I expected, so I rented a 9-foot U-Haul cargo van to move it. There was no way I could manage it alone, so I asked a Korean guy — a bit younger than me — who I’d had barbecue with the week before, if he could come help. He agreed without hesitation, and we headed out together to pick up the sofa.

Sitting behind the wheel of an unfamiliar truck was a new experience in itself.

(A brief reflection) That’s what America seems to be like — if you decide you’re going to do something, there’s always a way to make it happen. There was a lot of back-and-forth before I decided to come here, but I made up my mind and made it work. I want to keep doing that — deciding, and making it work — from here on out.

The sofa finally made it into the living room. The space that used to feel so empty is slowly turning into a home.

Dinner was Korean food. I wanted to treat the friend who’d helped move the sofa, and also another Korean friend who’d helped me a lot before I even arrived in the US — a small way of paying it back. I got takeout from a Korean restaurant called Jeong Kitchen: bulgogi, chicken, gimbap, and kimchi (courtesy of my friend) — a proper spread.

Day 2 — August 11 (Tue) · Delivery Rush and Trader Joe’s

Packages started piling up at the front door. My FlexiSpot standing desk and Cuisinart air fryer oven, along with everything else I’d ordered, all showed up at once. The standing desk’s legs hadn’t arrived yet — only the tabletop had — so I just moved the oven in for now.

I went grocery shopping at the same Trader Joe’s I’d visited last week. American grocery stores are all so huge that even picking up a few things means a lot of walking. This one’s the closest to my apartment (10 minutes by car), and it’s stocked tightly with just the essentials, which makes it easy to grab a week’s worth of food in one trip.

I wandered the aisles and threw in Greek yogurt, granola, cold brew, and a few snacks. All last week I had no way to make coffee at home, so I kept buying it out, and some days I just went without. Skip coffee for even one day and my head starts spinning. Still, I’m trying to stay healthy, so lately I’ve been making a point never to drink coffee on an empty stomach.

I also picked up an almond-and-chocolate snack someone had recommended.

I unboxed the Cuisinart air fryer oven and found it a spot in the kitchen — one more reliable weapon for a cooking beginner. Dinner was butter chicken reheated at home. I’m slowly figuring out how to survive on my own. It tasted good enough that I’ll definitely buy it again.

Day 3 — August 12 (Wed) · Orientation Day 1

Grad school orientation finally began. I have a car, but I still hadn’t gotten a parking permit, so I took the UTSW shuttle to campus. Everyone gathered at the Student Center for icebreaker activities, and I got to introduce myself to new classmates from all over the world.

At the end, we got a bag stuffed with UT Southwestern swag and a cold ice pop. They really rolled out the welcome for us new students.

And, I also found out there was another Korean student none of us had known about, which brought the total number of Korean PhD students I’ve met to four. She’s in a different program, and after orientation she suggested we grab a meal together, so we went out for ramen. I assumed we’d all split the bill, but she insisted on treating us — there was a whole back-and-forth over it, and in the end she won and we let her pay.

This kind of looking-out-for-each-other — jeong (정, that particularly Korean sense of warmth and attachment) among Koreans far from home — has been a huge help in adjusting to this unfamiliar country.

Day 4 — August 13 (Thu) · Orientation Day 2 · Standing Desk

Day two of orientation. It ran for three days total, Wednesday through Friday, and today was mostly a general walkthrough of the class schedule.

The UTSW Core Curriculum is split into three parts: Proteins, Genes, and Cells. Proteins is supposedly the hardest of the three, but since I’ve always liked life science, I don’t think I’m too worried about it.

Classes run Monday through Thursday, 8:30 to 10:00 a.m. There’s a literature-review discussion session on Tuesdays and an experimental-design discussion session on Thursdays, and Friday is presentation day for experimental design.

The exam schedule is as follows:

Proteins: Exam 1 on 8/31, Exam 2 on 9/28 Genes: Exam 1 on 10/12, Exam 2 on 11/9 Cells: Exam 1 on 11/23, Exam 2 on 12/14

On top of that, there’s RCR — Responsible Conduct of Research — training, covering research ethics, with six sessions scheduled: 9/2, 9/4, 9/16, 9/23, 10/21, and 11/4. We were warned that missing an RCR session comes with a (frighteningly) heavy makeup assignment.

Finally, the office that handles international students warned us to avoid leaving the US at all during our first year if possible. Still, I’m hoping I might be able to make it back to Korea next summer.

…

After orientation I got home to find the standing desk’s legs had finally arrived. Actually, they’d taken so long that I’d already requested a return — but the manufacturer offered me a 15% discount if I’d cancel the return instead, and I took the deal. America really is the land of the counteroffer. If something isn’t sitting right with you, you speak up and negotiate, and because of that, how you frame things and make your case seems to really matter here.

It wasn’t easy at all, but after laying out all the parts and wrestling with them for a while, my very own desk was finally done.

Day 5 — August 14 (Fri) · Orientation Day 3 · Safety Training

Last day of orientation. Free coffee and breakfast were provided. An iced latte from Lemmon Drop coffee shop woke me up, and then we sat through lab safety training — emergency safety equipment, emergency wash stations, and the like. It finally started to feel like I was getting ready to actually step into a lab.

Partway through the long lecture, I recharged with some Snacky Clusters from Trader Joe’s. Week two of settling in, and both my apartment and school life are gradually finding their footing. My body clock is finally starting to sync up properly.

Day 6 — August 15 (Sat) · H Mart, BCD Sundubu, and DIY Assembly

I slept in today, then headed to H Mart. My first thought walking in was, “Wait, am I in Korea?” I grabbed a cart-load of Bibigo dumplings and Kanu coffee — things I’d never expect to find in the US — without a second thought.

There was even a Paris Baguette inside H Mart. It had only been two weeks, but seeing a Korean-style bakery again felt like I hadn’t seen one in ages, and it was oddly comforting.

For lunch we went to BCD Sundubu near H Mart. Four of us ate together — me, and a Korean friend along with her Big Sib (something like a close upperclassman/mentor in her program). That friend is still a fairly new driver, so on days when we have some free time, we go for drives together and I help coach her along a little at a time.

Eating good LA galbi, fresh geotjeori-style kimchi (lightly seasoned, not fully fermented), and sundubu, I felt a wave of happiness wash over me. The saving grace is that I’ve never had much of a craving for Korean food specifically, so I get by fine without it most days. Still, on days when the Korean food is this good, my appetite comes roaring back.

After eating well, we stopped by Molly Tea for a quick drink. It was their grand opening, and people in pink cowboy hats were dancing away in the parking lot.

America really does feel full of bright energy. Seeing people smiling everywhere, cracking up over the smallest things, made me want to be more like that myself. Heaviness and lightness — I think I need to practice setting a little of the heaviness down and letting myself be lighter.

Then I fell into assembly hell again — this time an IKEA TV shelf. I’d ordered it a while back and had honestly forgotten about it since it took so long to arrive, but it showed up blocking the entire entrance to my apartment, so I had no choice but to drag it in.

I laid out the parts and struggled through it, and before I knew it, a whole wall was filled with a finished storage unit. Maybe I’m actually getting decent at furniture assembly?

Day 7 — August 16 (Sun) · Tidying Up

Sunday, I started the day catching up on cleaning that had piled up. I ran a load of laundry and ran the cordless vacuum over every corner of the carpet. At first, just thinking about how much dust must be trapped in the carpet made me a little reluctant to even come home — but after vacuuming it up bit by bit and setting up furniture and tidying, I found myself growing fond of the place.

I want to fix this place up nicely and make the most of the four years I’m allowed to stay in student housing. Whatever moving plans come after that, I trust future-me to figure it out.

I also bought a textbook based on an English study method I’d read about somewhere. Being here has really driven home how important English is, and I decided I needed to set aside dedicated time to study. I figured speaking and listening would naturally improve just from keeping up with classes, and that vocabulary was my biggest weak point. So my plan is to build up my vocabulary gradually with Wordly Wise, learning about 15 words a day.

After a slow, lazy afternoon and a short workout, I’m finally on the doorstep of my very first day of classes.

Day 1 — August 2 (Sun) · Finally, Dallas

A long-haul flight out of Korea. I watched The Godfather on the plane and crossed the Pacific over in-flight meals. The first time I saw The Godfather was back in middle school, with my father — he really wanted me to watch it. The word “Godfather” itself says it all: a life built on earning enormous trust from people, and returning just as much generosity to them. It gave me a lot to think about. At the same time, watching him help his own people even at the cost of hurting others made me reconsider, again, where the line for justice really is.

I landed at DFW past 11 PM. It was supposed to be an evening flight, but the American Airlines/Korean Air codeshare got delayed about five hours out of nowhere. So it ended up being my first time setting foot in Dallas, late at night. Unfamiliar roads, unfamiliar signs — it finally hit me that I was really in America.

Late that night, I finally made it to the apartment I’d be living in. Only once I’d dropped my bags did the long day actually end. That first-ever 13-hour flight felt like a warning that the road ahead wouldn’t be easy, and the jet lag that followed was the first time in my life my body clock had ever truly broken down.

Day 2 — August 3 (Mon) · The Day I Started Filling an Empty Apartment

My first morning in America started with Chick-fil-A. A close hyung (older friend) from my Daejeon days had insisted I try this chain. Since it was still early, though, only the breakfast menu was available, so I couldn’t get the honeycomb-shaped fries he’d so strongly recommended.

The Zinus bed frame and mattress I’d pre-ordered were already waiting for me. I’d gotten in so late the night before that I basically hadn’t unpacked anything and just passed out. Aching all over, I pushed through anyway, put the frame together, and pulled the mattress out to make myself an actual place to sleep.

Dinner was Chipotle. I’d had In-N-Out for lunch, and honestly, I feel truly blessed. All three of these legendary chains sit within a two-to-three-minute drive of each other — an insanely dense little “fast-food district.” Still, I’m trying to eat as “healthy” as I can manage. And in the middle of all this, Chipotle is genuinely a solid meal. The portions are so big, though, that I always end up splitting it into two.

Day 3 — August 4 (Tue) · First Visit to UT Southwestern

I visited the school for the first time. My first impression: “why is this place so huge?” They’re apparently building an enormous new Children’s Hospital (something like several trillion Korean won in scale), so the whole area was a massive construction site, which didn’t do much for the scenery. I went into the Kern Wildenthal Biomedical Research Building to do my international student check-in.

And today’s highlight — getting my student ID. Holding a card with my own name printed on it, it finally felt real. Right — I decided to go back to grad school. I felt a little nervous about what’s ahead, but also genuinely excited about how much new I’m about to learn.

That same day, I also bought a used car. This first week was so packed that I honestly can’t write down every single thing that happened. On day one I went and opened a bank account, on day two I saw this car, liked it, and signed the deal. And now, on day three, I paid off the remaining balance and drove it home. I found the listing through a Korean online community here in Texas.

Texas is so spread out that you genuinely can’t go anywhere without a car. So I moved fast to get one, and I’m glad I did, because it turned out to be spotless and in great shape. I want to take good care of it and drive it for the next five or six years.

From the day I landed, I was already imagining everything I’d need and going on Amazon ordering sprees. Back in Korea, ordering through Coupang means next-day delivery, guaranteed, but here, even with Amazon Prime, delivery sometimes slows down if something’s out of stock. It made me realize all over again just how convenient Korea really was. Still, once I’d stocked up on a mountain of daily essentials, the apartment started to feel more and more like somewhere an actual person lives, which put me in a good mood.

Day 4 — August 5 (Wed) · Daiso, IKEA, and Decorating the Apartment

I headed to IKEA first thing this morning — there was still a mountain of things left to buy. A desk, a chair, and a sofa were the main items on today’s list. To fuel up before all that shopping, I stopped by a chain called First Watch for breakfast. Pancakes, bacon, eggs, and an iced latte — a proper American brunch. The whole thing came out to somewhere around $20-30. Paying that bill, I felt, hard, the need to learn to cook.

At IKEA, I browsed desks and stocked up on a whole pile of kitchen stuff. I’ll be honest — I have zero skill at cooking. Actually, “zero skill” is generous; the truth is I don’t know how to cook at all. But the second this morning’s restaurant prices hit my wallet, something in me knew this had to change, so I was glad I could quickly grab some kitchen gear while I was there.

I was hoping to get an electric height-adjustable desk. But since I also wanted a wide one, the price shot up fast, so I’m still on the fence. IKEA’s Trotten line is manual but reasonably priced, in the $200s, while the 63-inch electric desk I actually want runs north of $600, so the internal debate continues.

Honestly, I think the chair matters more than the desk, so I’d already decided I had to get either a Herman Miller or a Steelcase. It happened that there was a used office-furniture store about a 30-minute drive away, so I stopped by, and it was genuinely stacked wall-to-wall with Herman Miller and Steelcase chairs.

After picking through the whole lot, I grabbed the one that looked to be in the best condition. It normally retails in the $700s, and I walked away with a well-known Steelcase Leap V2 for about 40% of that.

Just like the car, I ended up with a used chair in great condition. I don’t think it’s realistic to have everything brand new here, especially as an international student. Still, I felt genuinely lucky to be able to put together this level of setup at all.

Day 5 — August 6 (Thu) · Grocery Shopping and Yet More IKEA

Real grocery shopping today. I asked ChatGPT what I’d need to make Greek yogurt at home — bananas, yogurt, frozen butter chicken, orange juice. Since I’m a total beginner at cooking, I figure I’ll be replacing breakfast with homemade Greek yogurt for a while. Beyond that, my plan is mostly microwaving frozen food or buying meal-kit-style products and assembling them into something that passes for a real dish.

Maybe once I start actually craving specific things, I’ll naturally start cooking for real?

The IKEA I went to yesterday turned out to be small, without much to see, so I headed back out to a much bigger one near home. After browsing around for a while, I had Swedish meatballs for lunch — the little Swedish flag stuck in the plate was pretty cute. Being that huge, though, made it hard to track down exactly what I wanted. Still, walking through an IKEA on a scale I’d never seen back in Korea was genuinely fun.

Day 6 — August 7 (Fri) · License Plates, the Mall, and Ramyun

After IKEA yesterday, I grabbed coffee with some Korean students who’d also come to study at the same school, just to say hi. And now it’s the day after that. One of those Korean students showed up in a full On shoes and Alo outfit combo, and it looked so good that I decided I had to go check the brands out myself.

I looked for somewhere I could find both brands and landed on NorthPark Mall. It’s basically the American equivalent of a Korean complex mall, except — probably because land here is so cheap and plentiful — they don’t build up, they build sprawlingly out, horizontally instead of vertically.

Spotted a Tesla Cybertruck wrapped in mint green on the highway. Very Texas.

I wandered around NorthPark Mall, which has a fountain and an indoor garden. The garden had a lovely little fountain with turtles wandering around in it.

Alo took forever to find; I wandered around for ages before I finally spotted it and went in. It was packed with Americans — clearly a genuinely popular local brand. Buying the exact same outfit my Korean friend had on felt a bit much, so I tried to just get some running gear instead, but men’s activewear options turned out to be surprisingly limited.

There was a high-neck running top I liked, but they didn’t have my size, so I couldn’t buy it. I thought about ordering it online, but by the time I got around to it my interest had cooled off, so I decided to just skip it.

After that I headed to a store that carried On shoes, but it turned out to be more like Korea’s ABC Mart — a multi-brand shoe store, not an On specialty shop — so I couldn’t find the running shoe I actually wanted. That sent me off to REI, an outdoor gear store, to hunt down On running shoes instead.

This place is basically heaven for outdoor gear nerds. Patagonia, Arc’teryx, every recognizable outdoor brand you can name, all under one roof, laid out in a way that felt dense and well-curated without being overwhelming. Shopping there was a genuine pleasure.

I fell for an “Outside Texas” cap right at the entrance, and also picked up a top-and-bottom set from Vuori, the athleisure brand.

Same story with On shoes — nothing in stock — but they did have the Cloudmonster 3 model I was after, at least as a display pair, so I could check my size. I finished the job by ordering the color and size I wanted online.

After about a week of eating nothing but calorie-bomb fast food, I was craving Korean food. On a stop at Target for a few groceries, I picked up some Shin Ramyun. Ramyun eaten in a foreign country is always, always the right call.

Day 7 — August 8 (Sat) · My First Taste of Texas Barbecue

Breakfast was a light chicken Caesar salad with blueberries on top, at home. This morning I went straight to the tax office to register the car. In Texas, buying a car from a private seller goes like this: write up a Bill of Sale (proof of purchase) → take possession of the vehicle and the Title → register insurance → Title Transfer. That fourth step, the Title Transfer, is what requires an actual visit to the tax office. What you need to bring: ID (a passport, in my case), proof of insurance, the Title, and a way to pay Texas’s vehicle registration tax (6.25% of the vehicle’s value).

Once you register the car this way, you get a license plate and an inspection sticker. The sticker goes on the inside of the front windshield, and the plate goes on the front and back of the car. Until the plate arrives, you can drive on a temporary transit permit, which is valid for five days once issued. And the whole Title Transfer process has to happen within 30 days of buying the car.

And dinner was Texas barbecue. If you’re in Texas, you have to try — Terry Black’s Barbecue. I went with the same Korean friends I’d had coffee with recently, for a round of barbecue and beer.

Inside, the place was packed almost entirely with local Americans. Clearly a real, legit local favorite.

Brisket, sausage, ribs, mac and cheese, potato salad. Maybe because I’d built it up so much in my head, it wasn’t quite as amazing as I’d hoped. The sides were pretty good, though, so we paired them with the meat and had a beer each. Being able to sit around chattering away in Korean with Korean friends, this far from home, felt like a genuinely lucky connection to have.

Day 8 — August 9 (Sun) · Grand Prairie Outlets

Lunch was quick and easy at home — fried rice with an egg on top. The fried rice was a frozen vegetable fried rice from Trader Joe’s, and it was actually pretty decent — good portion size too. It’s probably going on my repeat-purchase list for next time I go grocery shopping.

In the afternoon, I headed to Grand Prairie Premium Outlets. It was so hot and I was so sleepy that I ordered an iced latte. It was labeled a caramel truffle latte, but there wasn’t a hint of truffle flavor in it — kind of a letdown. I settled for grabbing a running top-and-bottom set at Nike, since I hadn’t managed to get one at Alo, then picked up a pair of Crocs to wear in the lab before heading home.

In the evening, I sat in my apartment complex’s community lounge to prep for tomorrow’s meeting. The settling-in week is over — now grad school actually starts for real.

Getting Ready to Buy My First Car in the US: New vs. Used, the Essentials

A car is a pretty big expense when you’re studying in the US.
In a place like Dallas, where having a car makes life dramatically easier, it’s worth thinking ahead about how you’re going to buy one before you even land.

I’m scheduled to arrive in the US on August 2, so I put together a plan for how to prepare for buying a car between now and then.

Setting Up Your Phone for US Grad School: Getting a US Number with Mint Mobile

One of the first things you need after landing in the US is a US phone number.
Opening a bank account, dealing with your apartment, logging into school systems, using apps like Uber or DoorDash — all of it is a lot easier once you have a US number.

Thinking about this as a UTSW PhD student, here’s what I think is the most realistic way to handle your phone setup early on.

Get a US number through a Mint Mobile eSIM, and keep your Korean number alive just for receiving verification texts.

Setting Up My First US Bank Account and Credit Card

Once you land in the US, money matters come at you faster than you’d expect.
You need to pay rent, get a phone plan, buy groceries, and receive your stipend from school into a US bank account.

At first, “which card gives the most points” matters a lot less than how to reliably receive money, spend it, and start building a credit history.

This is especially true for UTSW PhD students, since most of us get a stipend — setting up a US bank account and direct deposit is basically mandatory.

Where T cells learn what “self” means

T cells are born in the bone marrow, but they mature in the thymus. And while they’re there, they have to pass two make-or-break exams.

The first is positive selection. Only T cells that can recognize the body’s own MHC molecules survive. If a T cell can’t recognize them, it dies.

The second is negative selection. T cells that react too strongly to the body’s own proteins get eliminated. Leave them alive, and you’ve planted the seeds of autoimmune disease.

Only the T cells that survive both gauntlets get released into the bloodstream to fight off outside invaders. The thymus is a precision filter, letting through only the T cells that react “just enough” — no more, no less.

But exactly where inside the thymus this process happens, and in what order, has been unclear for a long time.

The geography of the thymus

The thymus has two regions: an outer cortex and an inner medulla.

The textbook story is that positive selection happens in the cortex and negative selection happens in the medulla. But where, exactly, each individual cell sits, what signals it’s exchanging, and in what sequence it moves — that’s been hard to pin down at the cellular level, mostly because of technical limitations.

In November 2024, a study published in Nature took this problem head-on.

An international team including Nadav Yayon, Veronika Kedlian, and Chenqu Suo completed the Spatial Human Thymus Cell Atlas. Working with thymus tissue spanning from the fetal period through childhood, they combined single-cell RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and high-resolution multiplexed imaging to capture both each cell’s gene expression profile and exactly where that cell sits within the tissue — at the same time.

A continuous space between cortex and medulla

One of this study’s central contributions is a concept called the Cortico-Medullary Axis (CMA).

The conventional view treated the thymus as two separate compartments: cortex and medulla. This study showed instead that the thymus functions not as two compartments but as one continuous space running from cortex to medulla. T cells mature as they travel along this continuous axis.

To quantify this continuous spatial axis, the team built a new analysis tool called TissueTag. Each cell was assigned coordinates capturing “how close is this cell to the cortex, and how close is it to the medulla,” and the researchers tracked how each cell’s gene expression pattern shifted along those spatial coordinates.

A finding: when CD4 and CD8 cells part ways

One of the more striking findings in this study is that CD4 T cells and CD8 T cells enter the medulla at different times.

CD4 and CD8 mark the two major T cell lineages. CD4 T cells act as helpers that coordinate the immune response, while CD8 T cells directly kill infected or cancerous cells. Exactly when and where these two lineages diverge inside the thymus has long been an open question.

This study showed, spatially, that the two lineages enter the medulla at different positions along the cortico-medullary axis and at different times. In other words, a T cell’s fate isn’t determined solely by signals inside the cell — it’s also tied to where that cell happens to be within the thymus.

Thymic epithelial cells: the map of the teachers

T cells aren’t the only characters in this story. Thymic epithelial cells (TECs) act as the teachers, setting the standards T cells are selected against. Medullary thymic epithelial cells (mTECs) in particular express a striking range of tissue-specific proteins from all over the body — proteins that normally belong to the heart, the pancreas, the skin, and so on — right there inside the thymus, so that T cells reacting to those self-proteins can be identified and eliminated.

This study newly identified distinct populations of thymic epithelial progenitor cells spanning the fetal and childhood periods, and traced how these populations contribute to shaping the thymus’s spatial architecture.

Another key finding: the thymus’s structural framework is already established by the second trimester of fetal development. In other words, the immune system’s basic blueprint is laid down long before birth.

Why this matters

A cell atlas of the thymus isn’t just a basic-science achievement for its own sake.

When negative selection fails, self-reactive T cells survive and can drive autoimmune disease. When positive selection is insufficient, immunodeficiency results. In conditions like DiGeorge syndrome, where the thymus itself fails to form properly, patients face severe immunodeficiency from the absence of T cells.

This atlas provides a foundation for understanding exactly where in the thymus, and through which failed cell-cell interaction, these immune disorders originate. It could also serve as a practical reference for building thymic organoids that recapitulate T cell development in vitro, or for improving the outcomes of thymus transplantation.

From where I sit as a researcher

Two things stood out to me the first time I read this paper.

One is the power of spatial information. Single-cell sequencing gives you the gene expression profile of each individual cell, but it tells you nothing about where that cell actually sits within the tissue. Spatial transcriptomics fills that gap. Knowing a cell’s identity and its location at the same time gives you a fundamentally different kind of insight into developmental processes.

The other is the link between thymic development and autoimmunity. One question I keep coming back to is: why do autoantibodies form in certain individuals and not others? This paper suggests that part of the answer may lie in the process of T cell education inside the thymus — and in the genetic and spatial factors that shape that process.

Finishing a map of the thymus doesn’t mean the immune system’s secrets are all solved. If anything, this atlas is less an ending than a starting point — one that makes it possible to ask much sharper questions.

Yayon N, Kedlian VR, Boehme L, Suo C, et al. A spatial human thymus cell atlas mapped to a continuous tissue axis. Nature. 2024;635(8039):7944.