Well hello there. My name is Peter Vila (but my friends call me Pete), and I’ve been in Madison for quite some time. I finished up my double major in Molecular Biology and Philosophy in 2005. After doing some cool work with stem cells as an undergrad, I decided that bench science wasn’t for me (I’m way too social to be stuck in a lab playing with gels and cells all day) and I really don’t know what I learned from my philosophy classes, so I thought I’d change things up a bit.

I decided to go to grad school for public health at the last minute, because I thought this would be a good way to stay in a health-related field (I’m med school-bound) and yet learn some other interesting things about health and our health care system. So I’m working on finishing my Master’s in Population Health in May, and I’ve gotta say that it has been a great two years in grad school. I’m currently waiting to hear back from med schools for this fall, and if all goes according to plan, I will be starting med school in August…ish. I’m also looking for stuff to do this summer…I’ve applied for some public health internships in D.C., but I’m pretty much open to doing anything interesting that will involve learning and will keep me interested for the whole summer.

I’ve been involved with BrainReactions for a couple of years now, and it’s really been a great experience. Being sort of ADD myself, I can’t think of a better way to be productive while totally catering to my creative and spontaneous side. Speaking of creativity (here goes my ADD…what, shiny things? where?) I recently took the Myers-Briggs personality test, and apparently I’m an ENFP. For the uninitiated, the E stands for Extroverted (vs. introverted), the N stands for iNtuition (meaning I interpret the heck out of everything around me…everything has a meaning), the F stands for Feeling (I am rather idealistic and tend choose my words carefully rather than telling people the cold, hard truth), and the P stands for Perceiving (which basically means I am spontaneous and tend to accomplish things in bursts). Anyways, the reason I got off on this tangent is because one bit of advice the Myers-Briggs people offered to my personality type was that I should be in a career where I can exercise my creativity. I’ve never really thought about this before, but I think this is something very important that I need to think about in the future.

Well, you asked, so I told. In addition to school and student organization stuff (I do a bit of everything), I’m really into music. I very much enjoy writing music (as Darin so often likes to point out, yes, I wrote Misdirection, as he’s been known to play before some brainstorms) and have been really into improving my songwriting recently. As with most songwriters, the songs that we tend to write are influenced by the music we listen to, and I’ve currently been on a big discovering-new-bands streak. After my little affair with new music, I’ve decided to settle down and be serious with a few indie artists: Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, and Midlake have been getting some serious airtime on my iPod. So naturally, my songs have taken some influence from these bands, and I’ve been spending a lot of time (perhaps too much) writing new stuff and tweaking it little by little. Perhaps I’ll try my stuff out at an open mic sometime…my friends have been giving me good feedback about my newest stuff.

Still reading, huh? Well, I’m going to have to conclude this endless soliloquy and get back to work. I don’t get paid to write blogs, after all. Happy brainstorming, and I hope to catch you in the storm sometime soon!

-Pete

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