Let me clarify.
Grad school has become so much of my life, that I feel like my life is school. I’m not trying to excel in some balancing act of life and school, because life more or less doesn’t exist, and what little does exists only inside of school. Eating is for school, sleeping is for school, even reading news is for school.
On paper, I’m supposed to have about 35 hours of class a week. Every day except Tuesday, I start at 9:00 a.m. I end at 4:00 or 5:00pm, with a lunch break in the middle whose length is at my professor’s discretion. Sometimes I need to attend a seminar during lunch, so I have no lunch. It’s like a 9-5 job.
Except there’s also homework. Readings, short assignments, full blown projects. I’ve stayed up till at least 1am the past three nights. Normally that’s not a big deal. But since I have to wake up by 8 in the morning, well sleeping at 1 doesn’t cut it anymore. I usually use a good chunk of my weekends playing catch up.
So it’s a good thing, that at least on some level I’m enjoying what I’m doing. There’s a lot of hoop jumping, a lot of work that I feel is unnecessary or even detrimental, but there’s also stuff that I genuinely find interesting. City council meetings are bad, staged radio shows are good.
But still, my life that I had, all the stuff that’s made me, me, feels like it’s been tossed aside and put on pause. So, an understatement is to say it’s a breath of fresh air when a friend shoots an e-mail, when I talk on the phone with somebody from back home, when I even watch an episode of a TV show. It’s hard to explain why it makes me smile, except to say it reminds me that I still have a life to live outside of school.
I haven’t yet figured out how to fit into my schedule some other things I wish I could do. I have little energy to run, no time to really exercise, and no will to really do any of my hobbies like write. I don’t even have my guitar or a piano. I still haven’t figured out how to do the whole God thing.
The whole process is a mental challenge, usually a forte of mine. This however, is a completely different beast.
2 responses so far ↓
Pauline // October 3, 2009 at 6:14 am |
It gets easier after the first quarter
hang in there! But good to hear you’re enjoying it!!
star // October 4, 2009 at 8:57 pm |
You know how I feel now, haha…for me it’s currently 6 days a week at school, 8 am to 7 pm (sometimes 7:30) with only an hour for lunch, or less if we don’t finish with a patient in time.
At least it keeps us on our feet and our brains sharp.
Hang in there!