I Got My First A!

I know, it's kind of hard to believe. I mean, I've always breezed through school with nothing below an A average my entire life. But, if you can imagine, my entire first year of graduate school I failed to get anything higher than an A-. Now, that's worse for students in some programs than others. At Pitt it seemed that A's were kind of the norm and an A- was a penalty for really sucking at life. I only took one graduate seminar there and was being graded as an undergraduate, but still, that was the general understanding.

At CU, a whole different story. And, to be honest, I'm living it up in grad school. While others are hitting the books, I'm hitting the bars--in a city somewhere far from Boulder, every single weekend. Knowing that I merely have to pass, take what I want from it, and cut out once I graduate has made me much more interested in my life outside of academia than in it. But, I am now happy to say that I have officially received an A in a graduate course. No lie, I would have been pretty disappointed with myself if I had come out having never achieved that. And, get this, it was for a class where the final paper requirement was 35 pages, and mine was 16! Significantly less than half!

Go me.

The paper was also on professional hockey. See, you do well where your passions lie. ;)

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!

Wow...I think about a foot has fallen since last night. It's supposed to stop around 8pm. Here's hoping, because I got stuff to do tomorrow.

Amanda helped me take a huge sigh of relief by inviting me to get pelted in the face with compacted snow outside my apartment building. That's right. My friends are so cool that we had a snowball fight! And with her dog, Sadie, too. =)

Papers are all graded; just one more wave of them immediately after the final that I need to turn over in one night to get to leave for home as early as possible.

My own work has been pushed back as far as it goes, however, and now I am faced with a term paper per weekend and my independent study "project" to be squeezed in during the week--somewhere.

Here's to entering the tunnel. Hopefully by this time next week I'll be seeing the light.

Hopefully.

The Week Behind

This week was shaping up to be really rough coming into it. I had to "present" my reading to the class in Democracy in Everyday Life yesterday, which was difficult both because I generally have no idea what is going on in that class and also because we had to select our own readings and relate them back to the theme of the course. But, it went through just fine. I also had to run errand after errand on campus, and proctor the time and a half exam (for the third time this semester). Boo. And then came Tuesday. Tuesday revolves around tutoring, but this particular Tuesday I also had to meet with my independent study sponsor of sorts to chart my progress. This I was a little uneasy about, not because I had nothing to present, but rather because I had no idea what the expectations were for our meeting. Fortunately that went off without a hitch, and I will be able to make a creative project and write up a 10 page response on the process of its creation in order to receive my credits for the study. Woo-hoo! The rest of the week is busy, but not too intimidating. Hell, after mountain biking what can't I do?