The Land of Milk and Honey

I am on top of the mountain, and it is good.

It's been a few weeks since I last posted, but now I'm finally getting settled in to my new apartment and my new life as a graduate student.

Frickin' sweet.

The only thing I have to complain about is that fact that I'm sweating my balls off here. I went through 4 of my 5 years as an undergraduate before getting air conditioning at the apartment in Ypsi, but it's been a rough transition back to life without the glorious gift of central air. No amount of fans or windows can ever equal the unabashed delight of frosty humidity-free air.

That being said, everything else about my return to Michigan is great. I figured out how to get to 28th Street, Alpine Avenue, and Rivertown, so I'm pretty much set for all the modern conveniences I'll need. I found Buffalo Wild Wings on both 28th St. and Alpine, so I won't want should the craving for buffalo wings hit. Hopefully we'll get our meal accounts activated tomorrow so I can start getting free food on campus...

Back on campus. Living the dream.

We started training today, and it will continue for the next three weeks. Many hours filled with mission statements, policies and procedures, and all the administrative hoo-hah that one could expect from an academic institution. Good times.

It's been a little wired talking to people who are in their second year of the program, or other first year people who did their undergraduate here when they're under the assumption that I'm from North Carolina. They start explaining something about Grand Rapids or other local information, and I have to come up with new ways to politely say "Yeah, I know - I grew up 20 minutes from here." But so far they're good people, so it's all good.

On that note, it's time to go sweat through another night without air conditioning.

Birthday Shout-Outs

Just wanted to give a shout-out to Jon-Boy and The Captain for taking care of me on my birthday this weekend in Chi-Town.

Though I still have to yell at Jon one more time to get some freakin' furniture and food in his apartment. Just because you graduated from MSU doesn't mean you have to live a Spartan existence for the rest of your life. (For those who don't know about life in ancient Sparta and what the term a "Spartan existence" means - get some culture! Go look it up... now.)

Anyway... thanks for the view of the city, the drinks, Portillos, and showing me a good time for the old quarter-century mark.

I'm having one of those headaches with pictures...

"I'm no good at being a slave. I'm thinking about graduate school." ~ Philip J. Fry

Moving Out and Moving On

Well it's July now, which means I have to start the inevitable packing process. The problem is, most of the stuff I have that I don't regularly use is already packed away, never really unpacked from the move down here. Sure there's a few things in my office that can be put away and readied for transport, but right now the big focus is on what can be thrown away. Anything school related is automatically on the junk pile, but once again I did a pretty good purge this time last year.

As much as I may joke about it, my time spent in North Carolina was not a wasted year of my life. Nor do I feel like a failure for leaving after just one year. On the contrary - it's all proceeding as I had planned. The whole point of coming down here was to get a year of experience under my belt so that I would have a better chance at going somewhere and doing something I wanted to. I don't know if this year of teaching experience directly contributed to me getting my full-ride to graduate school or not, but it certainly didn't hurt.

And as I wrote a few weeks ago - I have that same sense of excitement for going to grad school as I did when going off to college for the first time as an undergraduate. Earlier this fall when I was realizing just how much teaching at my high school sucked, one of my older and wiser coworkers suggested I look in to working at the college level after the way I had talked about my experience working for U of M.

And really, it all goes back to the plan I had all those years ago before I had graduated from college. I always knew I'd go back to graduate school, but figured I'd wait and work for a few years before figuring out what I wanted to do. I knew I could always keep teaching, but that I also had other options more closely related to my psychology degree. As I've said before - I think getting into student services and academic advising may just be the perfect combination of those things.

In talking to the Captain about why he and Jon struggled so much with the first few years of college, and why so many students do, I actually got excited about the prospect of doing my final research project on something like that. I've never liked research, so the fact that I was actually interested in doing it with this subject matter seems like a good sign.

Of course, let's not forget the most important part of all this...

I get to go back to college, and get paid for doing so.