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.