One week down...fourteen more to go!

As I near the end of my first week as both a graduate student and a new teaching assistant, I've realized a few things:

1) I have always been a big fish in a little pond

This one is pretty self-explanatory. In essence, I began life as a brainy, book-loving, nerdy kid, and while I would never identify myself as a prodigy child, or the head of the class, I won't deny that my smarts and abilities put me well above average.


I skated by through middle school, high school and even college in the top percentiles of my class. I never got the top marks, but I also never tried that hard and that really gave me the impression that I was hot shit. But it turns out that I'm not all that and a bag of chips.

Now that I'm a graduate school student at a large school, competing with brilliant minds, I find that I am not as brainy, well-read, original, passionate, hardworking, talented, or intelligent as I thought I was. It turns out that not only am I average...I'm at the bottom of the heap! :( And that's both depressing and bizarre, because it's something I've never really had to deal with. It's also really, really humbling.

I'm not sure what that means, yet, but I'm hoping that this will lend me a can-do underdog attitude. I guess we'll just wait and see what happens.


2) I was not prepared for graduate school:

Not to be confused with the idea that I'm not worthy, (which was something else I was grappling with earlier this week). After all, if I wasn't worthy, they would not have accepted me, and they DEFINITELY wouldn't have offered me a teaching assistantship.

Before making the decision to attend K-State I read dozens of essays about reasons students should and shouldn't go to graduate school. I found that, in many ways, I had more in common with the students who shouldn't go than with the shoo-ins. To make matters worse, after constant education for essentially my entire life, I was ready to take a break and do my own thing for awhile.

Unfortunately, pressure from teachers, my family, the doomed job market, and an ever-increasing number of gradschool-bound peers pushed made graduate school look like "the thing to do". That, and I had no idea what else I should do.

And now that I'm in it, I can't help but feel like I should have given it a year or so. That's not to say my experiences have been bad- in many cases, quite the opposite- but I feel that it would be easier if I had lived my life for a few years, like many of my fellow grad students.

Oh, well. I'm here and I suppose I should make the best of it!

...To Be Continued!