So I haven’t been updating this blog very much, unsurprisingly. I have officially started grad school! We’re about to start the 7th week of my first quarter here at UC San Diego. It’s been really intense, but we have a long weekend this week, so I am trying to catch up on a few things.
Everything has been a lot. Classes have been more work than I thought they would be. I don’t know why I thought they wouldn’t take up all of my time. I’m taking two foundations classes now: Morphology and Phonetics. I don’t really have a background in either of these two subfields, so that makes them a bit harder. There’s a lot of reading for each of the classes, but that was definitely expected. It’s about the same amount of reading per class as I had in my final year of undergrad (at least these readings are in English and not in Chinese!). I haven’t even gotten to the final essays for the class, which is going to introduce a whole new level of overwhelm.
I’m TAing a class for my advisor, which has been pretty good. We don’t often have to lead sections in Linguistics here, which reduces the workload significantly. It’s been pretty smooth going so far.
As far as my own research, I have submitted to a conference and a workshop and attended the workshop in Santa Cruz. I had to prepare a poster really quickly, because I hoped to give a talk, but got a poster. Actually, the poster came a few hours before I was supposed to fly out and it came printed with the top and the bottom cut off, so that was really stressful. I think the poster session went well anyway. I had a really good time at the workshop. It totally wiped me out, though, travelling over the weekend and essentially working the entire time. I didn’t do myself any favors by picking a 6am flight to come back to San Diego on Monday morning.
I also got some good feedback about the content of my presentation/research when I presented it in my lab and at a reading group in the Linguistics department here.
I have submitted for one fellowship and I am about to apply to another one to potentially fund research next summer. Those applications have been some of the most stressful aspects of the quarter so far.
The thing that has been really different about grad school (other than the work load) is the lack of existential stress. I’m sure this will change as I progress, but I feel like everything I’m doing is for me and for my professional development, so I can handle the work. I mostly enjoy the things I have to do, which also helps. I’m busy and tired but I’m generally pretty content.
I’m still trying to figure out how to balance classes, TAing, going to cool talks, doing my research, and also taking a day off about once a week. Just wanted to check in. Maybe I’ll be able to reflect more on this at the end of the quarter.
