say my name…

Well, Internets, I graduated.

I realize this is an entirely anticlimactic post after months of a days-to-go count and whatnot, but I have to be honest with you: it turns out that May 20 was not exactly the Big Day or culmination I had exactly anticipated.

Many of my Milano peeps graduated in 2010 and moved on to bigger and better things. That fact was driven home when I arrived in the church basement to line up for our Recognition Ceremony and didn’t know many of the people there! It felt just like that terrible dream you had in junior high where you have no one to sit and eat lunch with. I wanted to sport a sign, you know, something along the lines of “Hey! I have friends too! They’re just…..” Well, working, or other things just as they should have been. Unlike that junior high dream, this was more of a strange realization than a scarring moment.

No, that happened later in the ceremony. While I have long joked about the difficulty many people have in pronouncing my last name correctly, so far I have been unscathed by any such mishaps at a Big Event. Though I’d written out a phonetic spelling and whispered it to the faculty member calling our names, wouldn’t you know, I heard “leen-ey” for “line” at the end of my last name and became Italian. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that).

I just couldn’t let this go, not as the technical conclusion to Grad School: Part Deux which took three years and precipitated a move to New Jersey. Just, no. So I had to stop short and say “No, LINE, like on a graph” and proceeded to actually draw a line in midair with my finger.

(Look, how many times do people actually use each other’s last names? Not often, and that’s why this was all amusing and not upsetting. We’re all good.)

After that surreal bit of performance art, the evening continued. I shared a lovely dinner with good friends and kept watch for a Big Moment. Of course, it never came because the week after graduation I went right back to work at career services as I have most days this academic year. The ceremony did not truly mark the end of my time at Milano.

Next week, however, I will be finished, and move on to devote my time to my job search and to write. I am ready, but my days at this institution are truly numbered.

As we left the church after graduation, a friend showed me the pictures she’d taken and apologized for missing the moment when I shook everyone’s hands and finished my degree; you know, when my name was called.   I think the moment she caught is so much better:

I will be back (soon!) to post a couple of final thoughts, as well as share a bit about the job search process and how that is going. In the meantime, I hope everyone is enjoying a wonderful summer!

Kristen

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giddy up giddy up let’s go

I suppose it is fitting that the last two weeks of a crazily busy semester would be crazily busy.  Knowing that ahead of time did not necessarily help matters.

Public Finance is one of the core requirements for Urban Policy students, and for two years now I have watched friends and colleagues grapple with the end of that course and seem to become exhausted yet positively GIDDY with excitement over one of our projects, wherein we are tasked with balancing a hypothetical state budget.  This year was my turn in this marathon.  I did that budget project, and then my planner started vomiting lists of deliverables and I have not really looked up much since.

You see, the same week that budget project was submitted, we submit our final exam for Public Finance and then we have one other small deliverable before we’re finished.  So suffice it to say that one becomes rather IMMERSED in public finance during this weird end-of-semester bubble.  Throw in preparing my take-home final for Poverty and Social Policy and a final paper for Sustainability Perspectives and Practices, continuing work for my fellowship, and the ongoing Quest for a PDR Client, and I am sure you can understand, dear readers, why I still can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that I finished my work for this semester on Friday.  It was not a dream; I really can file my course materials, clean my apartment, and, oh yes, I believe we may have some little things called THE HOLIDAYS to enjoy now.  Blimey.  So basically, I’ll still not get any rest to speak of until we’re into January.

My Poverty and Social Policy final afforded me the opportunity to actually think about how personal aspects of people’s lives–such as family structure–could possibly be considered in policy terms, given my own feminist, progressive politics.  I did find engaging that issue to be a particularly interesting touchstone in reflecting on my own politics and self.

While I may hopefully have great news on the PDR client front shortly, I’m holding off on writing about that process until I do (for hopefully understandable reasons).  I feel like this process of finding our own clients for our final projects can be a bit intimidating, and one of our tasks here is to demystify as much of this process as possible.  So, as soon as I can, I’ll address that.  This spring semester I’ll also be blogging about the process of actually DOING a Professional Decision  Report (PDR) as well as other experiences probably all falling under the rubric of “senioritis”.

I’m really ready to be done.  Really.  I set up my fall semester to bear the brunt of certain scheduling items so that this spring term will be less hectic.  What a relief.  That may have been the most clever move I have made in graduate school.  Really.  When you’re really ready to be done, actually having a few minutes here and there to help maintain your sanity during that last push is truly invaluable.

Have a wonderful New Year!

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and now for the biggest group project of all…

I’ve been “teasing” upcoming developments at Milano here for months.  I wanted to wait to discuss this until some sort of more official, clear, “ta-da!” announcement was made and I was clear on who had been told what, and so I wouldn’t be saying anything that incoming students wouldn’t know about.  What can I say? I wanted a clear conscience. Given that, the following is now not “news” but it will affect those of us who are new or continuing students.

Milano’s programs will be merging with the New School’s Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA) thus forming a new division of The New School (to be named soon).  How this affects your program, how any of us feels about this, etc. is diverse, as you should expect.

In the short term, we can cross-register for courses at each others’ schools/programs.  However, many of us have been doing so already for awhile, so I’m not clear on how this represents a change at this time!

There are also two (I would say three) cultures coming together here from the students’ perspective.  Having spent more than five minutes of time in two and quite a bit more in my home Urban Policy program, I can tell you that these are three distinct communities in certain ways, and as much back and forth and cross-pollination that occurs, there are certain specific experiences or philosophies binding each of us.  For Urban part of it is Lab; I don’t know what my colleagues in other areas would say, but since part of creating community has to do with a shared experience, I’m sure they have a sense of that as well.  Part of the process of joining these groups together, then, is figuring out how these merging identities will work and how much of what is most valued for each will be maintained.

I’m not heavily involved in that larger structural conversation.  As to the rest: it makes for fascinating observation in terms of group dynamics on many levels.

That doesn’t mean I’m “opposed” to this; far from it.  I’ve taken courses at GPIA and find their course offerings as well as the incorporation of more global perspectives to our work a great complement to the expertise being developed by those of us planning to work in policy (or management).  So from an academic, intellectual perspective this is absolutely an exciting development.

I am, though, feeling a bit wistful as so many of my friends and colleagues have their graduation ceremony in a few weeks, in small part because I wonder if my diploma will be different from theirs–and we will at least nominally have been separated into two incarnations of this school.  That rather disrupts my own personal feeling of community, doesn’t it?  So when it is time to return to the [school to be named later] this fall, we will have an exciting new sense of ourselves and will be seeing how much–or how little–change this does mean for us.  In the meantime, for a few weeks, I’m getting a little emotional about the fact that so many of the people who have been important to my experience here are leaving soon, or have left already.  It really is (oh, god, cue the cliche machine) the end of an era.

The new one for me is going to be dedicated to my work, the pursuit for which continues to be my first priority.  Milano has given me a good set of skills, and I’m eager to apply them out in the field.

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life, she is a crazy monkey face

Years ago when I was an editor at my undergraduate newspaper, we were covering in earnest (naturally) the college’s search for a new president.  To make a long story short, the gentleman selected for the job had been at the school for a few years, was fond of interacting with students, and was good at giving great quotes.  Really, is there anything better for college journalists? Besides, of course, garnering the respect of their community who, instead, might use each week’s copy as placemats in the dining hall rather than caring much about the work of the sleepless zombies stuck in some (usually) basement office at all hours?  That always seemed like it would be great to me.  Perhaps for my successors.

In any case, among my friends and I, several of whom were fellow newspaper people, one particular quote of our new president became a part of our crew’s lexicon because it was just so apt for describing any number of life situations, and is ever more useful as the years fly by.  I give you: “Life, she is a crazy monkey face”.

This week, another one spent trying to enter perpetually overcrowded elevators in a sterile modernist orange-staired building on 16th street, feels like a tipping point from which we’ll be speeding through to the end of the semester.  Quite suddenly, I had this sense of how fast things are flying by, a different sensation for me than fall semester’s meandering pace.  Right now I’m looking at the calendar feeling urgency, wanting to redouble my efforts to be back in the working world, and that’s where I’ll be heading for the rest of this term.  We have a couple of weeks until spring break, but what with the projects due immediately prior and the rapid pace into which you emerge after, it’s no wonder I’m starting to feel things are MOVING.

No doubt this is also exacerbated by the fact that we are in the midst of fairly extensive institutional change (more about that when we know more), generating an air of activity and uncertainty in some quarters, and for me, a thought that “this is NOT what I was expecting!!!”  (Granted, there are also part-time students who have said to me a version of: as long as I can still graduate in [their goal date] I DON’T CARE.  That is a logical view for some to have. These things do depend.  It’s also always better to appear nonchalant than worked up, so there could also be that interpretation.)

However, it being graduate school, I should have remembered my own advice, which is that you’re always going to encounter the unexpected in grad school: courses are canceled, faculty go on sabbatical just before your master’s project, how things “work” change, you discover an honestly new interest in something you hadn’t known before.  Grad school is a place rife with reason for lines like “life, she is a crazy monkey face”.  Funny, silly, unsettling, perhaps even scary, but certainly nothing like what you thought you would be in for, no matter how much you tried to answer every single question you had before beginning.

Although one question I had before I started here, concerning how well more humanities/”creatively oriented” people like myself actually performed in courses like quantitative methods, was well answered: just fine, and even well.  I concur.  Quant is not an unbeatable monster; it is something you need to respect and tackle one step at a time, certainly, but it feels doable.  I’ve been afraid to say so as I’m superstitious, but so far, so good.  Now THAT is an unexpected feeling for me.

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fear and loathing on fifth avenue

This whole year has become quite the unusual interlude for me.  I’m still a part time student; pushing up to full time status would actually not get me finished any sooner, given that the option didn’t hypothetically “present itself” until later this summer.  In the meantime, I’m still looking for a job, but the nature of what I’m looking for is evolving the further I get into my program.  That is a good thing, I suppose, but part of the evolution is directly responsive to our current recession.  I know that economists say that important indicators show we’re through the worst, but that hasn’t yet produced the jobs in which many of us are interested.

And what, to put this bluntly, does this mean for those of us undertaking a career change right now?  For my colleagues at Milano straight from undergrad work, or shortly thereafter, this job market means one thing.  For those of us with more work and life experience who began prior to the bottom falling out of the job market, many of the assumptions and information with which we planned and implemented our transitions, step one being matriculating at Milano, are no longer relevant.  Or even exist.

Of course I am not the professional who can advise anyone as to what to do just now.  From my end, it feels like any advice I hear from various quarters changes by the month, a release of a new jobs report, or even the week.  Frankly, not many of us have much control over what is happening out there right now, in a larger sense.  I do have several years of administrative experience.  However, in this economy a) many of the kinds of people I worked for have lost their jobs too (unemployed attorneys do not need secretaries), and b) all of that experience means I cost more (even if I took a big cut) than other admin candidates.  Agencies are telling folks like me not to even bother applying, as we’re too expensive to place.  Either way?  For me, turning “back” is not a good option.

This doesn’t feel like a bad thing, in the sense that moving into a more intellectually challenging and rewarding career was precisely why I went back to school.   In the short term, with a degree still in-progress, more work experience in a general way than others who might be “entry level” and not as much experience in the nonprofit sector, I’m doing the best I can to stay busy, productive, and make sure that when opportunity does strike, I am ready.

So what am I doing? Things like getting into better shape, writing here and elsewhere, turning into some sort of Martha Stewart-type at home, and, oh yes, tending to my part-time schoolwork are part of the ways I’m spending time.  Those make me feel productive, positive, and like I’ll be ready to hit the ground running whenever it is “time”.

That said? There is a scary underbelly to all of that positivity and yoga and running; fears I know I would not have had during my first graduate degree, having to do with how much time this is all going to take to get better, and am I going to end up succeeding in a way I want to?  Will it be possible?  Was this a mistake?  Did I pick the WORST time to do something like this, or what?  I cannot talk about what these months have been like without honestly saying that because I’m human, all of those fears and doubts creep up now and then, with little tendrils of something strong and dark grabbing at my ankles, or in the occasional nightmare where I type, over and over and over, and bring coffee to people I’m in classes with now.  (Nothing personal, y’all).

There isn’t much else to do, except keep sending out resumes, and to know that when bad days happen they won’t last forever.  I won’t be offering any other platitudes, but wanted to blog about this because this context has such impact upon my time at Milano.  I am looking forward to a time when things have settled and progressed a bit, and I won’t be so dependent on timely receipt of a student loan check that if it is late, I don’t end up having to call and email and traipse all over to try to get that money.  That alone will be a wonderful feeling.

(For the record, owing to this post title which was too fun NOT to use if I do say so, no acid, Johnny Depp, or writings of Hunter S. Thompson contributed to this writing.)

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change, change, and more change

My first week this Spring semester was notable only insofar as I noticed, by Wednesday, that I had only seen or run into one other student I knew.  Where have all the policy students gone, I wondered?  Graduated, further along in their programs and PDR’ing (that’s Professional Decision Report, our final project here), or who knows where.  Sitting outside waiting for class there are not too many familiar faces, reinforcing the reality I have known all along, that many other colleagues and friends will have graduated before I do.

I had a happy surprise when I arrived at my Social Marketing and Media Advocacy class to look over and see Laura! It wasn’t a given that as Nonprofit Management and Urban Policy students, respectively, this would ever happen.  That class will include a project for a client, and on hearing that formulation, I became a little nauseated, recalling the insanity of our Policy Lab a year ago (was it only 1 year? it feels much longer!) and its grueling schedule.  (I remember one day I forgot where I put my lunch, which was sitting, reheated, in the microwave waiting for me.  Good times.) Rest assured to you folks just embarking on this odyssey, it will be taxing, hopefully not too frustrating, and you will feel very accomplished at its end.  Then you’ll have to talk to yourself in a soothing voice henceforth when “group work” is mentioned, reminding yourself that Lab’s pace is not the same as in other courses.  You’ll be fine.  This was my psychological task this week.

There are other, more systemic changes, underway at the New School right now too. Ironically, I could not attend a meeting which might have helped clarify some of these since I was in class, but there will be some sort of reorganization of Milano and the New School’s Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA).  Details are forthcoming, including those relating to any changes that will kick in next year as I complete my program.  So far, there are some immediately noticeable cultural evolutions: more students from GPIA in my classes this term (several are in my Quantitative Methods course), and schoolwide emails addressed, on occasion, to “the Milano/GPIA community”.  It’s hard to frame an appropriate reaction when little information is at hand, but I’m human, so I have some concerns, certainly.  Upon more reflection, (this part is personal, so please do not hold this against Laura, Tushar, or Eulalia, dear readers) they center on the possibility of not claiming a space/division/location whose primary purpose and function is the creative, principled pursuit of progressive social change.  There are so many values both stated and implied at Milano, largely responsible for my decision to come here as opposed to pursue policy studies at any number of other graduate programs lacking such a philosophical commitment.

I’m not clear as to how dramatic or structural any reorganization of Milano/GPIA is to be, but I hope whatever we become remains committed to the progressive pursuit of social justice.  While these can be values individually held by  students elsewhere at the New School, there truly is something important in having an academic division whose structure and population share such goals-as does Milano.  I know my friends in GPIA are also concerned with making the world a better place, and have these values in mind, so my concerns are more structural than personal.  (You can take the theorist to policy school, but you can’t….well, you get the idea by now I hope.)

In any case, I’m sure we’ll all be hearing more about this as the term progresses, and I am curious to see what happens.

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it’s time to get this party started!

…would be what some MIGHT say about the beginning of a new school year.  I’m interrupting my electronic “unplugged” week today to do a bit of housekeeping here and there, but will largely be offline for the rest of the last week of summer vacation.  One reason I opted for this “unplugged” week is that I am still old-school enough to have felt quite an adjustment in the amount of time I was spending online as I began Milano a year ago.  I was used to spending all day on the computer thanks to my former jobs, but back then, after a quick check of the email and perhaps a blog post or two of my own, my laptop stayed quiet and cool in the corner while I went about my business of being fabulous in the City.

Last August, all that changed.  I do have a point to this post, which is the special welcome to the subset of readers out there who are nontraditional graduate students.  By this I really mean: starting grad school in at least your late-twenties.  Your peers are largely settled into their careers, maybe purchasing houses, living very sexy lives as international aid workers somewhere, or in some way doing things that say “AHA! I HAVE IT FIGURED OUT!”.

You decided that perhaps you didn’t, or at the least, you’d need another MS on the ol’ diploma wall to round out the space, and so as of this week, here you are.  Welcome!  Yes, it is going to feel weird.  At the risk of rambling, I’m getting to some practical tips momentarily, but for the benefit of my other readers out there who are not tail-end Gen Xers (we who were born in the mid 70s salute you!), I read a piece yesterday in the Times which included a really terrific summation of who WE are, in certain terms:

I’m part of the Peter Pan-ish Gen-X final trickle–and what do WE know about growing up? My friends are still broke, say “whatever” too much…are still deferring college loans and saying everything is the new something-else, including the 30s, which are the new 20s.  The economy is in crisis, and they don’t care; they have become Zen about debt, having been impoverished, if trust-fund-less, since they got out of college at the beginning of the millenium, a time of tragedy and war and turmoil, their entire 20s devoured by someone they refer to only by a twangy iteration of his middle initial.”

That is me.  W ate  my first MA, which was in Women’s Studies, and my colleagues and I had to watch the sickening, systematic deconstruction of nearly every organization for which we were planning to work in 2002, by which time some of us had nothing to look forward to except years of deferments and jobs temping.  I have paid my dues in the area of post-grad frustration, believe me. 

Now, back to Milano, and some tips for my new colleagues well-versed, at last, in good vino and about to rediscover the joys of $3 Chuck. 

1. Grad school is difficult, and I suggest that you decide for yourself right now to take on the work, to take on the challenge, to accept that you are going to make mistakes, that there will be failures, but you will only get back as much as you put in.  In yoga we learn that it is through our active engagement, through pushing ourselves to our limits to play on and explore our edge, that we achieve the most growth.  That may perhaps sound too hippy-dippy for words, but that’s what got me through my first year, in a nutshell.  Embrace this challenge.
2. If you have not, go ahead, bite the bullet, and sign up for Facebook.  After the deluge of hellos from your almost-forgotten high school compadres subsides, you’ll soon be adding a steady stream of hip Milanoites to your roster of friends, and occasionally you’ll want to know when a study group or a happy hour goes on, so get over any resistance issues you’re having and join.  Oversharing is NOT required.  I joined a year ago this week and I’m still here.
3. Blackboard is an online system you’ll access through your “mynewschool” site, and on which will be all sorts of goodies for your courses, from the syllabus, to some of your assignments, to message boards, and every course you have will use it. You’ll automatically be in it, but take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the features.  Since it’s been endemic since the early 00s (my first MA was just starting to use it back in ’02), there will be plenty of people to help you figure it all out.
4. How many group projects did they tell you you’d have this coming year?  Triple it.  Milano is well-known, rightly so, for what may feel like neverending group work. You may, in fact, come to rue the day that in your interview you said you enjoyed working in teams.  (I’ll be honest: I did!)  If so, that “enjoyment” will be pushed to its threshold, particularly those of you in Policy Lab (about which a whole different post of unsolicited advice will come in late December).  I found that ferociously protecting some form of time to sit, quietly, alone, uninterrupted was the tonic for too much togetherness.  If you have kids, I just don’t even know what to tell you about that since I understand that mommies don’t even get to pee alone.
5. Grad school, in some ways, is just not fun.  I’m sorry, and I struggled for the best and fairest way to put this, but during my first grad program, I was just about the most irritated, upset, forlorn, despairing person who felt like this potentially AMAZING experience was just being RUINED, ruined, I tell you, by: administrators, some of the faculty, Things They Told Me that turned out not to be true, etc., prompting my brilliant graduate program director to sit me down and say something that changed my life, and here it is (ahem): “GRADUATE. SCHOOL. DOES. SUCK”.  It just does.  Star faculty member gets some grant = adios, megapopular class, and hola, hundreds of po’d old and new students whose secret dreams of getting to be someone cool’s research assistant just got dashed.  Cue some sort of protest! Or, “Why do we teach XYZ this way??  This is a PROGRESSIVE program!”.  Yes, well, the problem is that The Man still speaks capitalism here in the U.S., and if you don’t learn how to speak some very basic version of “The Man”, your degree and career will have the shelf life of a bad pop-culture joke (to wit: Anne Heche, Britney’s baldness, Miley Cyrus).  Sometimes you are going to have to eat some lima beans.  You might not ever have to again, but trust me, you’ll be much more upset down the line if it turns out that your dream job has the fairly reasonable expectation that you can speak well using terms of reference that, problematic as they are, are in fact the discourse of your profession.  This is a PROFESSIONAL grad school, meaning that we are here to be professionalized.  That is, at times, about as much fun as it sounds.  (Blech).  The older you are when you start Milano, on some level the more logical this all feels, which is actually one GREAT perk to being an older student: it takes so much more to get upset about at this point.
6. Balancing work AND grad school well is a full-body, exhausting, tightrope walk.  Sometimes you really WILL have to stay late at your job, and even be enjoying it if you’re working somewhere that you like; then you’ll roll into class a half an hour late to get a grimace from your professor, discover you’re behind in the reading by a week, and feel thoroughly frustrated at your lack of progress in the course.  OR, sometimes, you will be up late (late for us 30somethings being, oh, 1 a.m.), and parsing your phrasing in a memo to be JUST RIGHT for your big policy presentation tomorrow, but then you oversleep, roll in late to work, get a grimace from your boss, chug burnt bad coffee to stay awake for the next 5 hours of meetings, and be half-dead with exhaustion by the time you finally get to DO your big presentation that evening at Milano.  These are both true scenarios.  Please do the best you can to practice the art of self-forgiveness.  You will be much happier for it.
7. Some of your friends “out there” are not going to “get” this.  Some of them haven’t been in school since the new millenium was coming in a few years and OMG maybe our computers would all DIE.  So your anecdotes about how amazing and different school is this time, how much more fulfilling, how YOUNG some of your colleagues will seem to you (get this: “they” say “sick” or “ill” now, as a GOOD THING!!!) are not going to be all that fascinating to your pals, as supportive as they might be.  That being said, no better group of people will exist to keep you sane.  Having a group of friends outside of Milano is actually really important to get more out of it.
8. If you see something, say something.  Claim your education, as Adrienne Rich once said.  If you have questions, if you’re concerned about how long/short a timeframe is, if you just plain screwed up your assignment and need help, get in touch with your professor, and present your opinion or concern.  Don’t let things stew.  You don’t have to follow the herd on this, either; if your problem sounds “different” from others, don’t let that stop you.  Different students have different needs, and you may actually find that your concerns as an older, part-time student, are not really going to be best-served through something like student government.  (For one, it might not even occur to you to go that route).  That is ok, as long as you feel like you have expressed your opinion or asked your question appropriately.
9. Relish this.  Relish the moments that you have when your “job” is to read something, think critically about it, talk to people whom I know you will largely find to be smart, capable, interesting colleagues, wear flip-flops, use your student I.D. to go to MoMA for free, get discounts to Carnegie Hall and the opera, just once, go to happy hour and sing bad karoake.  Enjoy the chance to repeat what can be great about being a student: the sense of possibility, new opportunities, and most of all, new people whom you will meet.

Have fun, and I hope to meet you soon!

-Kristen

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shameless teaser post: antici…pation

Forgive that Rocky Horror Picture Show reference, please, although if you’re not familiar owing to youth or if campy midnight audience-participation films are not your cup of tea, I apologize.  I know my casual American pop-culture references might make for some undesired confusion, but the fact that I speak in these metaphors actually types me quite specifically within a certain segment of Gen X.  Yes, Gen X: this is my only, but so well-meant, shout-out to any other entering part-time (or even full-time) students from my infamously lazy (according to the regular liberal media) cohort.  Welcome!  If you haven’t been in school for awhile, I’ll have some special words for you soon.

Special words for all, indeed, are forthcoming as we kick off our second year at Milano, hopefully wiser, and certainly more savvy about what words of wisdom we’re going to offer our future/new colleagues.

In the meantime, enjoy the next couple of weeks, and if you are in the process of moving to New York, remember some rain gear, as we are largely underwater this summer.  Naturally on or about August 31, the clouds will part and the heavens will shoot down sunbeams.  Just remember, you heard it here first.

-KD

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school’s out!

Greetings, readers, I am writing you from a Milano computer lab while some of us await our whole class to complete our economics final.  I am nervous about this since it felt like it went well which could portend badly for my results, but the important thing for the moment is: Year One is now FINISHED for all three of us bloggers.

Taking Economics during the summer has been an intense experience just in terms of the workload; while I found the subject matter interesting, it’s been a challenge to keep up with the reading and studying since we keep such a fast pace in this course.  You are moving what feels like triple time.  However, I do feel like it was manageable and a good use of a summer course as a part-time student, since it frees me up to take other courses this fall/spring, as well as completes the prerequisite for me as I enter more finance courses this coming year.

I also offer, to those of you with little to no undergraduate math or Economics experience that I did not find the course too overwhelming in either regard; I was pleased to discover that I remembered more than I forgot from long-ago math courses, and got very into the conceptual aspect of Econ which I know will serve me in good stead going forward.

We made it!  Now I am off to a much-needed summer break to recharge my batteries before we return for the fall term, and I am excited to join Laura and Tushar on some adventures in the Summer of Greatness.

In the short term, I am heading to visit with friends and family over a couple of weekends, and to enjoy writing, reading and thinking about places other than graduate school for a few weeks.

Peace!

Kristen

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the summer of greatness…

One of the perks of Facebook, Twitter, etc. is that while you, faithful part-time Milano student, are ensconced with your Economics textbook, notebook, calculator, and are schlepping everywhere to TRY to keep up with your work is that you get to see your full-time students adventures’ in what has been coined “The Summer of Greatness”.   This is the best exercise in vicarious living, to sit at home studying, imagining what my econ books would look like in more exotic, fabulous locales, sporting Havanaias, sipping  mojitos, the much-admired hottie on the beach.

Do you see what all of this homework has done, people?  Warped my brain.

Cheers,

KD

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