Be all that you can be...in Grad School.

To say the least I've been absolutely swamped with school and research. I figured it has been a month since my last post so I'm going to go ahead and write a new blog post for all three of you who actually read it. I send this blog out to all the potential graduate students who either have already been accepted or who are deciding if they should take the leap.

To anyone who is thinking about graduate school, do NOT take on the option lightly. Ask yourself 1) are you ready for a commitment that borders along the lines of marriage? 2) Are you willing to spare a decent amount time from your personal life? 3) Do you have the patience to feel completely stupid almost every single day you come in to work because to put it lightly, sometimes, you JUST DON'T GET IT! If you've answered "yes" to any of these questions then welcome to club as soon as you've found an advisor to take you on. You will become innundated with due dates and writing. You're desk will become your second home. Your advisor, well, they're your new best friend/butt-kicker *wink to my own advisor* Once you're in, he/she becomes your second brain; your go-to person.

First off, the decision to take on graduate school is something I'm still coping with. I know my advisor could be reading this now so I'll go ahead and elaborate by saying I made the right decision. I'm in the office everyday between 8:30am and 4:00pm. I have both research and school to think about and I have many deadlines for both. I have been an undergrad for the past 4 years of my life so switching to a more graduate level time management system has been difficult and I'm still working on it. But knowing this, I say that nothing comes before your research. I repeat, nothing comes before your research! I've learned this the hard way. Deadlines and tasks for school are deadlines and tasks, deadlines and tasks for your research are critical. My work is at a site that recently has become very unreliable (and dry). I must be flexible. I should be thinking about my next task months before I actually perform it, but also I need to be able to perform it on the fly. I must be ready to go on a days notice. This is commitment. This is my job. It's super fun, but it's still a job.

We as graduate students have to make certain sacrifices for our job. Quitting your old part-time job that got you through undergraduate school, taking time out of playing your PS3 and discontinuing those long nights with your friends. Preparations for sampling must now be made, abstracts and proposals must now be written; lab meetings to attend, guest speaker talks to attend. Your day may end at the office around 4 or 5pm, but remember that you also have school and that's something that you normally don't finish before your day at the lab/office is over. So you now have to come home and complete it there. Welcome to graduate school life.

Sometimes you don't get it. Sometimes you go through the motions to complete your research tasks but what does it all mean? Sometimes you don't get it. Sometimes you feel 100% retarded and think to yourself, how am I ever going to explain this to someone else when I don't even completely understand it? Well, you're not alone. Stupidity is key to good research. It makes you think about what your don't know or understand and then forces you to look for the answers. Whether that means looking through journal article after journal article or sucking it up and confessing to your advisor that you just don't understand. Realize that it comes with learning. Your advisor is there to help and also if you're not quite sure you want to ask your advisor first, then hit up any post-doc that may be working in your lab. They can be a big help sometimes. There's nothing wrong with your feelings. Just make sure you don't completely rely on everyone else to help you find the answer. I, myself, am working on just that as we speak because when you figure it out on your own, it means sooooo much more!

So, I hope this has helped, even a little, with your decision about graduate school. If you've already made it in to a grad school, congrats, but also be aware that this applies to you as well. No one is safe from the wrath of new beginnings and a more difficult future. It's a beautiful thing to think about when someone believes in you as much as you beleive in yourself and they take you on as a graduate student. It's borderline magical, because it makes you believe that your 4 years of undergrad amounted to something.

An update on my site:
Dry! I've been trying to get out to my site for the past 2 weeks but the water has been so low that not even an airboat can access it. I'm trying to collect sediment for my mesocosm experiment that I'll get to in next weeks blog.