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Thursday, August 18, 2005
The Journey Begins
The long-awaited weekend has finally arrived. After months of researching, planning, testing, applying, and accepting I’m finally off to graduate school in the morning. I feel now what I think I should have felt before I left for freshman year of undergraduate: anticipation for something bigger coupled with just enough nervousness to keep me excited about the whole thing. I can’t say that I have butterflies in my stomach because I’m too damn ready to get on with it, but I can safely comment that moving to a completely new area not knowing a single person in a several hundred mile radius has aroused in me a certain feeling that I can’t quite place my finger on. Academic life is nothing new to me, at least in theory, as I’ve read books, articles, and blogs about the subject: the necessary evils like various types of paperwork and the politics of simply being a part of higher education in America. As an archaeologist I can’t predict the future, simply help recreate the past. For this reason I can’t say where I’ll end up, but I have a growing suspicion that I was cut from the cloth of academia.
That being said, I leave bright and early tomorrow morning, embarking on a roughly ten-hour car ride to the Sunshine State. And so it begins. I plan on blogging the whole adventure, probably frequently before the novelty wears off and I get down to business. The original mission of Nomadic Thoughts is about to be realized: to document the thoughts and experiences of a new graduate student. I hope these posts aren’t completely useless. I’m hoping that someone who stumbles upon my blog will gain insight into what life is like on the other side of the graduation stage. It doesn’t have to suck, and most importantly it never has to be “the real world” (whatever the hell that means).
Posted by Will at August 18, 2005 07:58 PM in Graduate School