Anyone who has ever been in graduate school will tell you that it keeps you busy. Yes indeed, it does; the higher up the educational ladder you climb, the more commitment it requires. Which is to say, I knew it was going to be like this, but it’s a hard adjustment nonetheless.
The reward, however, is worth everything: I get to work on research that is really exciting to me. Everything else is a wonderful learning opportunity, no sarcasm intended. All in all, it’s really great and I love what I’m doing. It takes more work than ever before to keep up, but the challenge is part of what makes it worthwhile. Right now, I’m juggling quite a few commitments:
- As a GA, I’m helping with lit search about censorship in school libraries, monitoring an online seminar, and starting some work on course development for next semester’s IST 668, Literacy in School Libraries.
- For my teaching practicum, I’m working on course development to include more IT-oriented supplemental reading and in-class exercises for an undergraduate class in organizational behavior. I’m finding it fairly challenging to identify literature at the right reading level that discusses organizational behavior in IT settings.
- In my research practicum, I’m preparing to work on dynamic network analysis with the SU FLOSS group, starting with developing an edge weight decay function and data specs. I’m also helping out with a project reporting poster. Working in a research group is a very different experience from working on your own thing all by yourself, which is all I’ve really done to date.
- For one of my classes, I’m writing weekly mini-papers that analyze the structural elements of literature on research that is interesting to me. This is much harder than it sounds, because it starts with finding something interesting to analyze, and then requires a lot of thinking very hard about it.
- There is a lot of work for my qualitative methods class. We’re reading a book a week for most of the semester and I’m trying to get in the habit of making reading notes, which makes it take quite a bit longer to complete each book. I’m preparing to co-lead a class session in two weeks, and the week after that I have to turn in an annotated bibliography on process analysis, but I haven’t started on that specialized technique project at all yet. We’re also doing a field study, which is very time consuming when it comes to writing up field notes. In many ways, the field study reminds me of SI 501, except in this circumstance, we actually have some clue about what we’re there to do and how we’re supposed to do it.
While I only have two classes plus two three standing meetings per week, the credit load is completely misleading - 9 credits can really consume you at this level, whereas I can remember taking 18 credits one semester at good ol’ Alma College. It is no surprise that keeping up with my schoolwork makes it hard to keep up on other things, like housework, photography, and blogging. Re-establishing some kind of school/life balance will be a project for next semester.