Sometimes the best thing to do is face your fear head-on. I've been reading online a bit, about people who are or have failed out of graduate school. What I realize is that I'm not alone at all about feeling scared about failing, or realizing that I went into this process completely blind and uncomprehending about the pitfalls and troubles I could face. There's this interesting site by a woman who left her PhD program four years in. I thought it was pretty interesting:
Straight Talk
I start my classes tommorrow. Man. It's been a wild week...
Wednesday, I hung out with my friends from college- my buddy
Steve and all his former residents that are now entering junior year.
Kinda weird- those kids are now the same year me and Steve were when we
met during their freshman year. It was a pretty chill, laidback night-
we sat around drinking and watching Netflix while they smoked and I
watched. It was basically like any other time I've hung out with these
guys- which was a
Two years of grad school equals taking out about 41k in debt. Add the 26k I have in debt from undergrad. So I'm looking at about 67k total. Add in interest, and we're look at mid-70's kind of debt.
Crazy, huh? It does scare me to think about the amount of debt I'm taking on. I have to keep telling myself about the boy who calculated that he's taking out 64k in debt JUST for undergrad, and then I feel a bit better, but it's still crazy. I am lucky that I kept private loans to a minimum
Okay, so I'm starting school over in western PA at this school called IUP, which is 5 hours away from home. It's pretty far out. I'm not taking my car, so it's not going to be the easiest thing to get a ride to and back.
I recently found out that close to my hometown, and at my undergrad school, UD, there are plans to have Jason Mraz perform on September 28th, which is Tuesday. If I skip out on Monday and Tuesday classes, I could prolly swing going to the concert.
So herei
It was pretty great. The sun could have been better- it was slightly
overcast, but the humidity was low for a 92 degree weather day, which was nice.
I spent at least a good two hours crisping in the sun. I don't have to worry
about sunblock because I'm Filipino. We're genetically engineered to be
sunburn-proof. I've never gotten a sunburn in my life.
And it was just nice to see the various gay couples throughout Rehoboth. I
counted four couples holding hands, which just made me smile- e
UD Raises Tuition for 2010-2011 School Year You gotta love the logic of it. "We're raising the tuition because we have to cover the increasing financial aid demands of the students." Gee, you think maybe the fact that school is constantly raising tuition has nothing to do with the fact that more students need finanical aid? It's the out-of-state students that get really screwed though- their tuition has been raised 2k, and they're now paying $24,500.
I loved being a Blue Hen, and t
I got into a minor fender bender today, incidentally while I was going to make
an insurance payment for my mom's car, which I drive. I got distracted and ran
past the intersection and hit a guy's car. Luckily, since it was a low speed
area, it didn't do much damage- just a small dent and some scratches above his
tire. I gave him my number and am praying that the damage is less than 400
dollars so I don't have to use my mother's insurance and jack up the payments.
My nerves are shot right n
I FINALLY decided on where I'm going, and that's Indiana University of Pennsylvania. I realized the only reason why I was considering Millersville was because it's only an hour away and I could take my car, and other than that, Millersville doesn't really offer a whole lot. Like it doesn't have graduate housing, and it doesn't offer a wide variety of classes. I'm a bit wary about the fact that it's 5 hours away from home, and I likely can't bring my car as my 1999 beater couldn't handle a 300 mi
I got an A in Public History, an A in Theatre 104, an A- in, and a C in Italian. That means I got a 3.3 for the final semester of college, which brought up my GPA from a 2.64 to a 2.75. Alright!
I was over at my favorite bar tonight. I was there for an acoustic guitar show by a guy named Jefe. Afterwards, I was watching a good amount of people crying their eyes out. Because it was the Jefe show they'd ever see at the Deer Park Tavern as a college student, you know?
I was seeing one guy in particular. He was just bawling his eyes out, and comforting and being comforted by his friends. It went on for at least half-an-hour.
I had a bit of a cry later in the car- you
I got my acceptance letter to my back-up school yesterday. It's
this mid-sized public university in western Pennsylvania called Indiana
University of Pennsylvania, or IUP. Now I'm just waiting to hear back
from my first choice, Millersville. Either way, it's great to know I
have a place to go to no matter what.
All I have to do now is just make sure I pass Italian, and
things are good from here on out. It's strange how that's parallel to my
experience of the spring of 12th grade- I got
My whole family is bitching at me right now because I'm applying to this
school called Millersville Univeristy, which is, at an hour and a half away,
'too far' for me to go, and 'isn't a good school'. They keep bitching at me to
apply to a closer school in the area, and look at closer area schools, which I
have! They are either too good for me to get into, or they don't have my
program. Then they bitch about me about how I need to take educational courses
if I'm going to be a community col
Over at Adam Phillip's Yahoo group, I made a comment about how I felt a bit dirty for having sexual thoughts about Taylor Lautner, because he's all of 18 and that feels wrong to me somehow. Adam said that there's absolutely nothing wrong with having those kinds of thoughts about a young dude, because it's not actually a child I'm lusting over- it's a young man who's in terrific shape, and I shouldn't feel like there's anything about having salacious thoughts about the guy just because he's a goo
Does it every just spring up on you?
Right now, I'm feeling it. I'm writing up a CV for my professor to get him
to write a recomendation, and I realize...I peaked at the age of 20. I haven't
done anything noteworthy since 2007.
College started out great for me- I was a tutor, I was involved in a sport,
I had a job, I was involved in a lot of activities.
And then I transfer to UD, and I get it into my head that I'm John Walsh
from Fraternity Memoirs, and I don't do anything except
Today I attended the first funeral I've ever gone to. It was
for my sister's father-in-law, who died after a two-year battle with
liver cancer at the age of 55.
It was a pretty surreal experience, seeing someone I'd talk to
lying in a casket, dressed up like he was in life, and made to look like
he was just sleeping. That's the first time I've ever gotten that close
to a dead body, and man...something about that was just really strange.
The memorial service was pretty beautiful, and th
I just spent the day at my alma matter- we had an Alumni Lunch, catered by Capriottis. (It's a chain sub shop with really good sandwhiches.) It was pretty fun- reliving the good ol' days when I was just a kid and my biggest worries were whether or not I could get away with sneaking out of the boring assemblies without getting caught. After the luncheon I just sorta hung out with a few fellow alumni in the front lobby of the school, singing songs and laughing as we reminisced about times gone by
I got the heebie jeebies the other day when I was playing the game Farmville yesterday, and I got a notification that B.P. had done something to help my farm.
B.P. died back around August, an apparent suicide. He was only 22. After that, his father took over the page, giving us updates on stuff like the funeral. Then he started sending us stories about Brian. Now he's apparently using his son's facebook page regularly enough that he's playing Farmville under the name of his dead son
And all that jazz. Hope everyone is happy this Christmas Eve day.
As for me, I'm doing good. I had my best semester GPA at UD- getting a 2.975- almost a 3.0! I had two As in my 300-level history class, then a B- in geology and a C- in Italian. I'm satisfied with how I did this semester. My 2.975 brings my accumulative GPA from a 2.42 to a 2.53, which makes me feel good to finally have my GPA over the 2.5 line. Now if I can just get it to 2.66, I'll be good because that takes me into the B-
So I did spring semester registration. I might push around some classes, but right now I'm taking:
Italian 107
two theater classes
Two 400-level history classes
It's pretty good. I don't have any classes that start before 11 a.m., and I have Friday off. Which means Thirsty Thursday should be alive and well this semester.
The best part is that I got into the internship class- I'll be working as an intern with a company called Gore. I think I'll be helpin
So right now, I'm at this glass-half-full deal when it comes to school. I'm a history major. I'm taking two 300-level history classes. They're both going really good- I'm earning an A in one, and an A- in the other.
The problem is that my foreign language class, I'm pulling somewhere around a D, and in my geology class, I majorly bombed the second exam, which was worth 25 percent. Luckily, I did fine on the first exam, and the final is worth 50 percent, so I can probably do well.
I just had a conversation where someone told me that it was demeaning to refer to my friend Steve as my "stoner" buddy, rather than my best friend or some such thing. He thought I was trying to sound cool by inserting the stoner buddy bit, and in doing so, both demeaned myfriendship to my friend Steve and offended his own sensibilities.
What I'm wondering is...do you think the person has a good point? Is it demeaning to do that? I suppose that in a way, it's taking a single charact
I just discovered that I racked up a $953 phone bill. My mother is, of course, pissed, and I feel pretty guilty.
When I was 16, I used to have scorn for the people who lived their lives on their cell phone. Now I'm like, one of them. So weird. I never thought it would happen to me.
This is what happens when you make your social life revolve around your phone.
You meet someone and you're awestruck by them. Here's how I think it can go- the first is that you meet the person, and you think they "hang the moon", to use one of Adam's phrases. You're blinded to their faults in that initial rush of attraction, but as you get to know them, you realize that something's off, and they're not as perfect for you as you thought they were. It could turn out they're downright horrible people with an initial charm (aka Neal in ISWB), or it could just turn out they ar
So I just got chewed out in Italian today. And it was my fault- I didn't do the work. And it hasn't exactly been the first time this semester that this has happened, and I think the professor finally just got fed up.
I'm not really offering any excuses. I know it's all on me. And I know that I've got to turn it around. I also know that while there is still time to turn it around, that time ends soon. So. I give Mark Arbour and Adam Phillips full permission to slap the shit out of m
