Recap

Me to Rachel (11/20/09):


I'm SO SICK of the deep south today. And not because it sucks and I hate it or whatever, but just because I wish I was around NE people that KNOW me and LIKE me without me having to try. And people that have the same interests as me and the same histories and don't think anything I do or know is weird. I miss the ease of NE people.

School's going good. I'm learning SO MUCH and thinking SO MUCH... I don't think I've ever been challenged like this before. UNK was SO EASY and I think the Sociology department there dropped the ball in some of my classes. There are things I think I should have known that I'd never even heard of and... argh. Little things like that annoy me and make me a bit self-conscious. All the other kids in my cohort know A LOT about sociology (3/5 have their master's already) and I hope that I'm everything they expected when they accepted me.

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Me to Rachel (12/1/09):

Current master's students are working towards their PhD. Our program is designed so that you get your master's on your way to your PhD but if you have your master's already you can transfer in to finish the rest, you'll just be a year behind. So for me school'll take 6 years and for the kids with their master's in my class, it'll take 5 years.

Chase and I are good. I was really impressed with how he handled the week with my family when we moved down here and he's been nothing but supportive of me the entire time we've been here. He got a job at the beginning of November at a call center and doesn't like it, but at least it pays. I don't know if he plans on staying there for awhile but knowing Chase, he'll stay out of laziness. He's gonna start taking classes next fall at the community college and work towards getting a computer degree of some sort.

I find it hard to live somewhere without knowing/doing a lot of the things available to me so we've been out and about a bit. We've made a few day trips to Atlanta, spent a weekend caving in Kentucky, went to the ocean, have gone kayaking and have explored the shops/parks around Athens as well. I spent last week up in North Carolina at my uncle's so I'm getting acquainted with the life and scenes of the south. I can't wait to get down to Florida and over to New Orleans but that'll probably have to wait until May when I don't have the ever looming worry about homework and what I still need to be working on. Meh, such is life.

Grad life is... stressful. For me anyway. I've always got reading I should do and I'm expected to know the material we're covering and have thought provoking thoughts related to it when mostly I've been expected to come to class to learn instead of engage in masterful discussion before. I had discussion classes at UNK but they were easy to BS and I rarely struggled to understand the material at that level. I think that my knowledge of stats and the relevant literature plays into it as well. In a few more years I'm sure I'll look back at this time and smile but at the moment it seems like I'll never "master" this.

Here each cohort has 4-6 students in it. There are 6 years of cohorts and the first 4 do have 4-6 each. I think the 5th year cohort has 2 (because the other students decided to leave for some (unknown to me) reason) and the 6th year cohort has 3 or 4. I was assigned a mentor but I don't really get along well with her. We're friendly and she's nice, but I'm not the same kind of person she is... she's more of a "Southern Belle" and is more refined than I am. The other students in my cohort are friendly and the office is nice but I don't really have any close friends in my cohort. It seems like they're more interested in drinking and socializing that way and I'm not really that big of a drinker and prefer more intimate socialization. There is one girl from the year ahead of me that I have recently started hanging out with more and talking to more. I think she's probably my closest "friend" and yet, we're not close. But at least it feels like she "gets" me... that's a big thing for me. Damn, this sounds depressing. I think if Chase wasn't here I'd have put myself out there more and would be closer to some of the other students but... that's really not who I am. I'm more comfortable with how things are now and feel that, with a million friends or not, this is how I am/should be. Though it would be easier if there were more people I felt "close" to.

If I really thought my undergrad work was AWESOME I could try to get it published/present somewhere but I think I've used it for all that it's worth. I've gotten out of it what I wanted to (getting into school) and now I'm ready to work on something more interesting to me. Finding out what that is... that's a bit harder. I feel so overwhelmed with knowledge right now that it's hard for me to sort things out and feel like I've got a good grasp on anything. I feel like every time I learn something it goes on a little index card, and rather than have a catalog to organize that card on, I'm just throwing it on the ground and cards keep covering others up and it's hard for me to find anything unless I know exactly what I'm looking for. I want a catalog. I think that'll help.

I struggle with the question of whether I really have never been at this level scholastically or whether it atrophied when I worked at RYH but... I don't know. I hope it's more of the first.