short days and long winter nights

It’s been three weeks since classes started, but it feels closer to three months. The hardest thing so far has been finding a schedule that works for both the personal and the school stuff as well as realizing many of the great talks on campus happen while I’m in class during the evenings. As a Year One my schedule consists of schoolwide and program core courses and so far it’s been a mixed blessing. The biggest benefit has been the heavy concentration of other Year Ones in the classes, this has served to take off some of the hesitation about being vocal during class for fear of sounding  ‘stupid’.  On the other hand having core courses have given me mixed feelings about the collection of courses I am taking this semester. By far the most difficult course for me this semester is my economics class. Initially I was considering taking Quantitative Methods, but after the student panel during orientation I decided to go with the economics core course – Economics for Management and Public Policy.  Part of the difficulty lies in having the dominant part of my grade determined by the midterm and the final (80 percent), with homework and classroom participation making up the remainder of the grade. Essentially, it’s a microeconomics course and while supply and demand may work for widgets and widget consultancies, it is hard to map that on to the nonprofit sector which is essentially answering the need for services that the for profit sector was unable to find a profit driven response too….

By far my favorite course has been Making a Difference: Global, Organizational and Individual Perspectives of Social Change.  This class demands my engagement and then once engaged it smacks me around a bit … just to send me out into the school week a little pissed (which is a good thing). The readings test my base knowledge and understanding of critical thought while giving me enough gristle to wrestle with the stuff I don’t know yet. This is one of the rare classes over my college career (both undergrad and grad) that I’ve found myself looking for other readings to supplement the assignments for the week because I want to be better prepared for the class.

As it stands my Theory and Practice of NonProfit Management class is my least favorite course this semester. Essentially, it’s a survey course and I believe for me after 5 solid years of nonprofit experience I was looking for more ‘theory’ and less ‘practice’. We read …. we talk…[we are] getting bored and it’s only week four. Hopefully, the professor will recognize the lack of participation as a cry for help and will shift to meet our needs.

The tally thus far for reading (in pages): 114 (week 1), 201 (week 2), and 234 (week 3)….

Eulalia

PS  – I’ve added a couple of pics from this week’s ‘snow day’….school was canceled which was good for me (as my new notebook was delivered) but was a dud for the snow enthusiasts. NYC only received 8-9 inches while my hometown of Philly (a 2-hour drive away) is sitting in 88 inches worth of snow (over the course of back to back weekend snow sessions).

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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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sick and tired…

Yes, my friends, that is where your faithful pals and colleagues have been in policy-land: sick and very very tired.

Word of warning: there are now so many rhinoviruses (sounds more menacing than “germs”, doesn’t it?) floating around the Milano building that I would not blink if the heretofore unaffected started sporting scary spaceman outfits, so as to avoid the pestilence.

Maybe my perspective is skewed (entirely plausible, since I am really going only on personal and anecdotal evidence, as well as, you know, Facebook) but first we hit the wall of tired, and then fell limply to a pile of kleenex.  Or something.  Basically, we’re all working 24/7 with our groups, assembling research (even when you know that you don’t have time to do more, there are always these tantalizing reminders of your project, everywhere you go, all day long, prompting you to KEEP GOING past the point of reason) and hopefully analyzing/preparing briefings/assembling our many future documents.

I don’t know.  It’s hard to sum up in any sort of interesting way, because frankly, I’m resisting the temptation to talk more about MY project right now, but we really have gotten to a point where we’re breathing this, and dreaming it, as well as hoping that our solutions are going to be useful in some way.  This is the sort of thing that leaves you very drained, but hopefully feeling very proud about too.  I’m joking about the sickness going around because it’s to be expected under the circumstances, and also, what better bonding moment can you have than diverting attention from The Project to fetch more tissue/handkerchiefs, more tea, and share home remedies?  I’ve just learned about one involving tea with raspberry jam and some sort of liquor, and if it weren’t for the person’s grandma who makes it living all the way in the Ukraine, I’d totally be swilling it by now.  I mean, doesn’t that sound good?   Someone else swears by Sudafed, which makes me so crazed that I’d talk even more than I do now, and now?  Now I talk too much because that is what happens when I’m tired–I babble.  It’s truly unfortunate, and I have apologized many times.  In that sense a sore throat is a small blessing for others because I can’t do it. 

I am enjoying an evening of obsessing over finding some graphics that are really specific (oh, believe you me, I know what I am looking for, internets) for…I’m not even sure.  Just in case.  Whatever.  I’m sure we’ll get to the bottom of it during our late night meeting tomorrow.

Carry on, ya’ll.  And to our friends Out There??  We do miss you.  And we will see you…well, honestly probably not until Spring Break or May, depending.  But when we’re not dreaming about Lab, we’re totally thinking of you.  Honest.

-KD

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Sleep? What’s that??

I really am still here. I swear. My blogging absence has been dutifully noted and will be addressed tonight. Right after a 15 minute power nap…zzzzz……. Ok, just kidding. But I really have had to resort to power naps lately at a rate not seen since the days of my last semester of undergraduate. Warning: The faint of heart should not enroll in 19 credit hours, work 10 hours at an internship (unpaid!), work 30+ hours at a PT job, be involved in school activities and attempt to finish a senior thesis all at the same time. But somehow I survived that, and I intend to survive my first semester here in grad school at Milano. (Plus I suppose it all worked well for me since I earned an A+ on my senior thesis and was hired from my internship into full-time staff after graduation.)

It’s not as if my schedule is really even that full right now, compared to the above or compared to many students who work full-time while attending school full-time, have children and families or are attempting to juggle classes with teaching assistantships. But compared to my first few months here, I’m exhausted, and for the most part, happy about it.

For all students this time of year is stressful and busy. Finals- enough said. Which may be why I am now questioning the reason I began interning at a nonprofit consulting firm last week, instead of simply starting in the beginning of Spring semester. For all practical purposes, I know why it worked out this way: I was interested in the firm and was eager to jump into the projects, they asked me to start at this time, etc. etc… But working on top of the many group projects Milano throws at us, plus tending to my numerous final semester-long papers has been a handful.

What I remembered after these past few weeks though, is that I work best like this. Procrastination tends to creep up when I have too much free time tempting me to watch movies and do fun art projects instead of study. With less free time, I know that I only have X amount of hours to do Y paper. No ifs and or buts about it, I have to do it NOW. It gets finished and I am more focused! I wouldn’t say that everything benefits from this focused time management (just ask my family who I never call, my boyfriend who I never see despite the fact that we live together in a tiny apartment, my gym membership, my laundry or my dishes…) but right now, the most important tasks are getting the attention they deserve, and I’m happy to do it.

It’s not as if any of this is groundbreaking or news to any graduate student, but for some reason it took me a few months to remember. Now my goal is to NOT forget it in January when May finals seem soooo far away…

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