Back on the Ride

Well I came be back from the field and jumped right back on that TT rollar coaster. It has been 3+ weeks of non-stop chaos. I'm exhausted and there is no end in sight. This is a recurring theme here, and somedays I'm not sure that it's the theme I want to be living. At the same time I can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing, so I slog on. (That's not entirely true, I'd rather be traveling the world, but that's a bit unrealistic methinks).

This semester adds a couple of new dimensions to the ride though, so I thought it might be worthy of a blog post. I am an advisor. Yup, you heard me right, the shoe is most definitely on the other foot now, and I've got to tell you it's terrifying, fun, and frustrating all at once. I have two students, different as night and day. Both are going to be great graduate students and I'm sure they will succeed, but all that stuff between know and then is definitely going to be interesting.

This experience has gotten me doing some self-reflection. I've been trying to remember what it was like to be in their shoes. A brand new graduate student, fresh out of undergrad, trying to figure out what's what and make a go of it. Moving farther away from home, having a pseudo salary, balancing courses and research, narrowing down a research topic at all. Figuring out just what research is anyways.

I've been doing this mostly to remind myself that I shouldn't expect them to know everything all at once; what's natural to my trained research brain is completely foreign to an untrained one. In the process it's made me remember some stuff too. Over the course of my graduate school career I had two different advisers (one for my M.S. and one for my PhD). I had very close relationships with both of them, but at the same time, both relationships were very different. Which reminds me that there are many different ways this can succeed, there is no magic formula.

Both were fantastic advisers and both taught me different things.

AND both probably deserve very nice letters thanking them for what the gave me, and apologizing for what I gave them, particularly the one that got me first, because if I had even a little in common with my new students, I'm sure I'm responsible for some gray hairs on his head!!