grad school and ical

My first week (really, more like three and a half days) of grad school was crazy amazing and overwhelming at the same time. Today I actually sat down and made a chart of deadlines in iCal. The good news: I know when everything is due. The bad news: I have a TON of work to get done.

Coming back to school was a difficult decision for me. In all honesty, I wasn't the world's best student as an undergrad. I pulled off decent grades, but it always involved a lot of gnashing of teeth, a few all nighters, and occasionally getting trapped in a construction site and wiggling through an 8 inch gap in a fence. This time around, I am a lot more focused, but there's still a certain amount of self-doubt lingering about my ability to really hunker down and get work done. Never mind the self-doubt about my ability to consistently show up for an 8 am class two days a week. (Biostats, no less!)

All that said, I'm pretty excited about my classes. And the most reading intense classes are also the two areas I'm most interested in - policy and program evaluation. My research also looks like it's going to be challenging and fun. I'm still waiting to find out if I get an office or not, but in the meantime, the HMP student lounge appears to be sorely under-utilized, possibly because it doesn't have a coffee maker.

Anyway, I'm headed to bed now, although staying on a reasonable sleep schedule is already a challenging area. *sigh*