Saturday, August 28, 2010

Present and Future


The week is over... Overall it was a good week, academically, I finally stated to make a good advance on my thesis, taking two courses while working on it is, so far, a piece of cake... Yeah! I can hear the "Tell me that after four weeks!" screaming inside my head... But being overly optimistic is necessary in my case if I want to cope with all the things I might need to do during this semester...

I've been searching like crazy for prospective universities that might consider admiting me in their programs, and I'll keep doing that for the rest of the semester, I have to study for the GRE test, and in the worst case scenario I'll have to take the TOEFL again. Of course lack of money and time is the perfect seasoning for something that I refuse to call bad but that I'll certainly tag as problematic semester.

Certainly the road to PhD is not the easiest road for me... This is exemplified by the fact that when I uploaded my resume to a few job websites I started recieving job offers by e-mail since the first week, and even a phone call! Man... . I have to admit that getting a job (at least) seems easier than getting accepted in a PhD program, and that the word "research" scares me a little and fascinates me at the same time, but I've fallen in love with teaching, so this is the path I want to take, and I'll not give up until all the windows that I see in front of me are closed. But I really hope that by the end of the year (the academic one) at least one stays open.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Time for some Action!


 
The new semester begins, my thesis is slowly but smoothly advancing, interesting things to do in the lab, and the thing I more glad about... The students!

The noisy (in a good way), happy and carefree freshmen that just arrived and see everything as a new world… Those slightly more levelheaded sophomores, some of them starting to discover that they came to the university to study and not to play, some of them already with a clear idea of the things they want. The juniors, some worrying about the many paths that can be taken and the different futures available for them, some worrying that they didn’t invest the past years in a better way, others, worried about their GPA and their grades. The seniors, some of them worrying if they made the right choices, some of them worrying about where to go from here, some of them, the luckiest ones, happy that everything is coming to an end, they have a juicy job already waiting for them and the university was like a hell made out of books. And finally, the graduate students, most of them hold the value of knowledge as one of the most important things in life; some of them reached the conclusion that to increase the amount of their paycheck it becomes necessary to add a few more lines to their resumes; and there are those who want to discover new things, either to help others, to make a contribution to society, to get money for their discoveries, or simply for the sake of discovering something that nobody had discovered before. I love those guys, no matter their drives they are here to learn.

I had the opportunity to teach some of those guys last spring, it wasn’t exactly as a teacher, more like a laboratory instructor, but I really enjoyed it. I discovered myself happy to show someone else what I knew and to share my knowledge with them. I wonder if it’s something that runs in the family… My grandmother was a teacher, my aunt is a teacher, and my father is a university professor… And this past semester I found out that I want to be a teacher too!

And here I’m thinking of continuing my studies to get a PhD and teach in some place, while working on my thesis and working on the lab… Sending resumes to professors in some universities while at the same time I’m doing to same with job seeking websites. And the moral of this story is that if I had studied more when I was an undergrad, I wouldn’t be wondering about which university will be interested enough, not only to accept me, but to fund me as well. I’ve been an outstanding grad student, but my undergrad GPA keeps me wondering… I will have to do great in the GRE to make up for that… The people who read this… Which me good luck, if you believe in god, then pray for me, I’m doing that every day.