A long first week...and it's only Wednesday

Well I've almost made it through my whole first week of graduate school. I only have one class tomorrow and then there's a lovely 3 day weekend. (Would be 4 day if schools in the state of Virginia recognized Labor Day as a holiday. I think they should considering the guys in Congress who are our neighbors in DC made it a national holiday. Go figure.) But I digress. Let me recap my first encounters of graduate class for you.

Monday began bright and early considering I left the house at 7am in search of parking. I was assuming the first day would be bustling with people who didn't quite know how everything worked (myself included) so I left plenty of time to make a few errors. (Me? Never!) I arrived at the English Department building by 8am after browsing two parking lots to finally find a space. I was able to get my keys for both my mailbox and office, as well as chat up our very nice English Dept secretary who I'm sure makes the world go round for us. I spent the next hour or so getting settled in my office and taking stock of what was provided for me: an iMac which I share with my officemate Melissa, a desk and chair - office furniture that must be more than 20 years old, two large bookcases which actually still contained some interesting books, two floor lamps - yay we don't have to use icky overhead lighting! - a minifridge, a very old and used coffe pot, and a mini-microwave. Melissa and I consider ourselves quite lucky that we have a minifridge and microwave considering no one else in our vicinity does. Our neighbors to one side do have a couch, but I think that would encourage me to relax and eventually nap. Which may or may not have positive results on my performance. I have recently purchased an air freshener and some clorox wipes which I feel will make all the difference in helping us to settle in.

I made it to my first class which began at 9:30, a class simply entitled Practicum. This is a pass/fail class that all first year Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) are required to take. The goal of the course is to help us prepare our lesson plans and syllabus for teaching freshman composition in the spring. We had a reading and short response due that first class. Somehow (and I still haven't figured out how) I read the wrong book! I'd like to point out that I spend quite some time ensuring I read the assigned chapters quite thoroughly and writing a detailed response. I didn't want to start this program off with some of the reading (read: skimming) skills I had honed in the course of my undergraduate degree. Sadly, I discovered in the first few moments of class when everyone else pulled out a different text that I had been mistaken. Thus, I borrowed someone's copy and skimmed before I was able to participate in the discussion. I explained the mistake to the professor and she just smiled and said no worries. Thankfully! Although it was a rather upsetting start to the day, I took a deep breath and moved on.

On Mondays I have this horrendous 5 hour break between my first class of the morning and two later afternoon/evening courses. I decided to stay on campus during it (which I later regretted) in order to be productive rather than going home and napping (which is what I really should have done). I went and ate in the Squires Student Center which has a Sbarro pizza place and an Au Bon Pain (kinda like Panera Bread) place. It's crazy expensive though, so I foresee packing my lunch for the most part. I later wandered halls of my department building to get familiar. I discovered one staircase takes you directly to the 3rd floor, don't pass Go, don't collect $100. Since my office is on the 2nd floor, I shall stay away from this staircase. I even later felt super important as I directed a young freshman girl to a correct staircase which would take her to the 2nd floor and comforted her with the knowledge that even I had initially made that mistake.

I spent quite a bit of time goofing around on the internet and with my fellow students that afternoon. It was rather boring to spend so much time in my office. But my 4pm class finally rolled around. This one was Critical Theory. It's one of the handful required for first year English MA students. It seems like it will be a pretty decent course. Theory is always tough stuff to get through since so much of it is just this dense, complicated, stuff. But the professor is really laid back and he makes the class enjoyable. I had this class again today and we sat around talking about how to justify our existence in the field of English for most of the class. Why do people study English and why should they continue to? We tendered a few answers but didn't come up with anything we thought would convince the university to give us more funding.

My class after that at 6pm is one that is just Monday nights and it ran until 9pm. This course is called Contemporary Pedagody (pedagogy being the study of teaching and consequently learning). This is another one required for all English first year GTA students. It is also part of a certificate program we can earn in addition to our MA which is called "The Future Professoriate" certificate. This is my largest class since it has students from all disciplines (although the English dept is the only one that requires it of their GTAs, anyone else takes it just from interest). The professor to this class is a hoot. She was one of the presenters during the workshop last week and I loved her there. So I'm hoping our class is going to be good. Although by the end of class Monday I was already exhausted considering I left the house at 7am and did not return until 9:30pm that night. I ate dinner and did some reading and finally gave up and crawled into bed by 10:30pm, an early evening compared to the summer!

Tuesday was a lighter load of classes with only two, and the first doesn't start until 11am. Although I again arrived a good 2 hours ahead of time on campus. Thankfully so, since it took me nearly an hour to find a parking space. I spent the rest of the time doing some required reading for the class meetings I had that day as well as catching up on the reading I needed to do for the previous morning's Practicum class which I had done wrongly. The 11am course is Genre Studies, for this semester the subject is the Essay. This was the one and only elective course I was allowed to take this semester. Everything else is a requirement of one kind or another. The professor for this Essay class is the kind I enjoy the most. He's personable and he really cares about his students, but he sets the bar extremely high in terms of what he expects from us and the sheer workload we'll have going on. We have to write 2,000 words (at least) to bring to class each time it meets (thankfully just once a week) on the reading that we did for that day (usually about 50 pages). We'll be learning a bit of the history of the essay and how it has developed along with some contemporary essayists, and composing two of our own essays. It's sort of a creative writing class in the sense that there will be workshops for our essays in class. I'm excited about that portion of it. I'm a bit intimidated by the workload though, so we'll just have to see how it goes.

The second class on Tuesdays (and the only course I have Thursdays) is Literary Research. This course covers a history of English and American literature as well as works with ways of researching. We'll have to write a lengthy research paper for this course as well as do several projects on the research process, but the professor said he wants us to use this class to start work on our areas of interest for our thesis. Apparently most students end up using this preliminary research in their final project and thesis. This course goes hand in hand with another one we're enrolled in that I have on Wednesdays at 12:30, Library Research. The librarian who runs that is really nice and knows EVERYTHING about the library. This course is just for first year English graduate students. She'll be helping us conduct our research for the Literary Research class, as well as figure out how to navigate the library as a grad student, where to go, and how to get into our thesis topics.

So that's my six classes. Other than that, I've just been running around trying to get unpacked and organized. The weather has been dismal the past two days. It poured down rain all morning and is FREEZING! Granted, it's above 60 degrees outside, so it's just my thin Florida blood trying to cope. But I had a sweatshirt and a coat and was still cold. I also spent half the day soaking wet which didn't help. I did get the chance to sit in my office and put my shoes on my heater to try and dry them out in between classes. I was almost tempted to put my pants on there too, but didn't feel confident my officemate wasn't going to walk in and be weirded out. Besides, we have a window that looks out into the atrium of the building and people could see in if they really wanted to. I don't want to start a reputation as the GTA without pants on in her office.

Okay, well that's all I have the energy for tonight. Many thanks to those of you who stayed with me this long. This post turned out to be a novel in the making. Much love to you all!