I have to say that I have loved my grad school experience so far. I am constantly amazed at how drastically my day to day life has changed over the course of a few days time. I went from my last day of work on a Saturday into orientation the following Monday. My life hasn’t been the same since. I have loved everything about the experience, even though at times I might gripe, I am honestly the happiest I have been in a long time. I come out of every class a little bit more confident than the last and I have gotten the hang of the work load in 6700. The only thing lacking in my experience right now is actual literature. I hear other GTAs discussing books that they are reading and I really miss that aspect of my college experience. I know it will come later and that it would honestly be too much for me to handle at this point, but that doesn’t make me miss it any less. I, like Conor, have also struggled to maintain a certain balance between school work, teacher work, and personal fun. I feel like I have had many years to develop strategies to keep everything afloat (the busier, the better for me), but I have never experienced a work (and fun) load as heavy as I have in the past few weeks. I hope the work (and the fun) continue because I honestly wouldn’t trade either. Well maybe I would trade HotEL, because it is basically like learning a foreign language, but I know I will come out better for having gone through it.
Sep 262016