The weeks and days leading up to my move to Ottawa to start my program at Carleton I was really nervous.
Would I get along with my roommate? Are there extra-curricular activities for me to get involved in? Who were the people in my program? What would the differences be between graduate school and an undergrad? How difficult is it being a teaching assistant (TA)?
There were so many unknowns.
I am happy to report that so far everything is going well, aside from a couple of things. I had a little bit of trouble finding my way around campus the first couple weeks, and I still haven’t figured out Carleton’s tunnel system.
“So far the most challenging thing about graduate school is being a TA. There is nothing like having 30 students staring at you while you are try to facilitate a discussion that they’re not really interested in participating in.”
This fall has apparently been a very rainy one for Ottawa, so the sky has been primarily overcast or raining since I arrived. Lastly, I still have not convinced one of the groundhogs close to my buildings to let me adopt it, but I’m working on it.
My roommate and I frequently have late night dance parties in our apartment, and get up to all sorts of other shenanigans. I’ve also made some other friends in res I can procrastinate with/watch TV with/make large Sunday dinners with, which is great.
I have found some extra-curricular activities to keep me occupied on campus. If I didn’t have these and I’d go a little nutty.
I am one of the Canadian Studies department representatives for the Graduate Students Association Council as well as the Political Action Committee associated with the GSA Council. I am also the Treasurer for the Graduate Residence Caucus, so I’m responsible for operating a budget for our events and that sort of thing ( it’s accountancy that makes the world go round).
And of course, I’m still writing for TalentEgg.
A grumpy groundhog
The other 19 people in my cohort are pretty awesome. All of us come from different academic backgrounds in the arts (English, International Relations, Women’s Studies, Law and yes, even Canadian Studies). This makes the discussions we have in the core MA class really interesting.
In addition to those in my cohort, the second year MA students as well as the PhD students I have in my other class have been great people to learn from in addition to discuss issues and concepts with.
It seems that everything I’ve heard from people about graduate school sucking out your soul and making you cry is relatively untrue.
I think a lot of that has to do with being an undergrad English student: we were expected to read up to 300 pages a week per class. If I was taking two English classes in a term and if you’d factor in the 50 pages I’d read on average for other classes, I would be reading close to 500 pages a week sometimes.
As a graduate student I’m reading between 100 and 150 pages a week per class, which works out to be around 300 pages total for a reading-intensive week. Even when I factor in the undergraduate French class I’m taking, it seems like I’ve actually got less homework now than I did back then. But I’m not complaining…
So far the most challenging thing about graduate school is being a TA. There is nothing like having 30 students staring at you while you are try to facilitate a discussion that they’re not really interested in participating in. It’s getting easier, but I still have a lot to learn and improve on.
Maybe all of this will change once my work load starts to pick up, and I have papers to mark. But so far, so good!
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