The Catch Up Game

Hi there!

If you've never read my blog before, which is highly probable, I mostly write on here as a form of stress relief. Call it a way to organize my thoughts on "paper" without actually keeping one of those ridiculous lock-and-key diaries. Sad fact, I don't really publish anything secret on here. Sorry, no scandalous info for you! Plus, the only scandalous info I have in my possession would be funny cat pictures.

So, I have recently went over my latest posts. Uhm, not much I can say other than: "Wow. Was I a whiny undergrad or what?" So, a lot has changed in the year or two since I've blogged. I am now happily married. After RPI denied my graduate school application (I think that was the last blog I posted), I was accepted at Washington University in St. Louis and Drexel University. Based on my current location, you can probably tell that I chose Washington University. It was a hard decision: move half-way across the country away from my family to go to a lofty private school or stay close to home to go to a small university where I could probably receive much more one-on-one attention from caring professors. I chose the lofty private school because of the economy.

If the economy still stinks when I've graduated with my PhD, then the least I can do is make my PhD look more flashy by getting it at "the Harvard of the West." Honestly, I feel like all the hype about WashU is just silly. It's a nice college, it's well funded, and it's got a lot of good professors and programs. But just like every other college out there, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. Luckily, I'm NOT putting in the massive tuition money.

But that's enough about school for now. I've had a run of weird circumstances that I've never had the chance to blog out recently. After accepting my acceptance at WashU, I found an apartment here in St. Louis. Within hours of finding an apartment that let me keep my cats, I lost my dad to heart disease. It was a real shock and threw me for a loop my last semester of undergrad. I love my dad and I still miss him. I wish he could have gone to my graduation. Two weeks after graduation, I left my recently widowed mom to move here. My husband started a new job and I started grad school orientation.

Grad school is scary hard. Like the hardest thing I've ever done. I've seen at least one peer quit and I know of others who are unhappy. After my first semester, I was on academic probation. That meant my second semester was all stress. Oh, and on top of dragging my grades up, I taught introductory physics labs to freshman. I did that again my third semester. By the way the fact that I had a third semester, means I got off academic probation (with a lot of sweat and tears of course).

Somewhere in between all of that, I got married (Nov 11, 2012) and I went home to move my mom out here to be with us. My best friend moved here to be our roommate in November of 2012! It is currently winter break before my fourth semester. If I get everything done right this semester, then I will have my Master's degree and will have qualified to start my PhD research. Today I finished writing the novel that I mentioned in previous posts and am excited to start the search for a literary agent.

That's about it. Obviously other stuff occurred (a lot of it) but nothing I'm willing to post publicly on the internet. Hopefully, if anyone ever reads this, I've entertained you for a moment or two.