One of the hardest parts of adjusting to PhD school right now has been getting my sleep schedule back to normal. For some reason I have been falling asleep between 4am and 6am every morning and nothing seems to be able to change that. I have tried Unisom, Nyquil, warm milk - the only thing that I haven't tried is prescription sleep aids (and I'm not so keen on going that route until I sign up and pay for health insurance!).
For now I'll have to be content with asleep at dawn and waking up close to lunch time - eventually (I hope) things will get back to normal soon! Thank goodness for the internet, audiobooks and 24-hour TV - they're keeping me from pulling my hair out when I'm done with homework and can't fall asleep!
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
This is PhD School? Part 1
Ok, so now I'm officially in PhD School. It doesn't feel like being a student has felt in the past. In undergrad I was part of a class of 1400 people (almost 90 of them black - the relevance will be obvious soon) and in Business School there were around 800 of us (at least 50 black people). There were a lot of us and we were separated into residential colleges (undergrad) or cohorts (MBA) that became platforms for socializing, forming new relationships, etc. By the third week of class I was a little stressed out in both situations but I was also exhilarated by the whole thing - it was a new school, new people, new concepts, new future opportunities - it was awesome!
This is nothing like that. We have an incoming class of 13 or so and I'm the only person of African descent (funnily enough that is about right if you consider that 6% of my undergraduate class was black - we'll ignore that for now). In my department there are three of us coming into the class - me, an American who went to Ohio State and a woman from some part of Latin America (I think). It is a SMALL class.
Most of the class is from outside of the US and I would say about half are Chinese - this in itself isn't really a problem but after each classes we seem to naturally separate into three groups: the native-English speakers, the Chinese speakers, and a group of two made up of a Croatian and a Persian (from Iran), who sometimes hangs out with the native English speakers. Then there is the Latin American who basically disappears after class but is becoming a bit more social (she was sick last week so that may have something to do with it).
I have three class sessions a week - a total of around 6 hours. Classes are interesting (not in the "wow, this is interesting" way) - apart from the class titled "Philosophical foundations of Research" it is mostly a review of stuff that I learned twice over. The other two classes, Statistics and Microeconomics, are not so much giving me new knowledge as they are presenting that information in a different way and showing me how to use those concepts in different settings. We are basically learning how to think about Economics and Statistics as a researcher would. It is all very practical (and hence not all that "interesting").
The Philosophy class is basically teaching us that "A PhD, or Doctor of Philosophy, Is a Person Trained in Research, Able to Advance the Knowledge in Their Field of Interest" (quote taken from a slide from the first class). Now this class is completely new information and so far has been truly interesting. I like it.
The best part of PhD school has been my Mentor/Adviser - she is great. Extremely sharp, very well respected in the field and very much capable of helping me avoid true disillusionment (<---- never used that word before and quite surprised that the spell checker didn't give me a red squiggly line just now). I'll write more about her later but the work that she is assigning to me is quite interesting and she already has some really cool stuff for me to dig into as the Semester continues. She is working on a lot of stuff and really needs assistance getting it all done - an excellent opportunity for me to learn about becoming a "great researcher."
To be continued (or, as they say in Ghana, "watch this space")...
Doc2.0
This is nothing like that. We have an incoming class of 13 or so and I'm the only person of African descent (funnily enough that is about right if you consider that 6% of my undergraduate class was black - we'll ignore that for now). In my department there are three of us coming into the class - me, an American who went to Ohio State and a woman from some part of Latin America (I think). It is a SMALL class.
Most of the class is from outside of the US and I would say about half are Chinese - this in itself isn't really a problem but after each classes we seem to naturally separate into three groups: the native-English speakers, the Chinese speakers, and a group of two made up of a Croatian and a Persian (from Iran), who sometimes hangs out with the native English speakers. Then there is the Latin American who basically disappears after class but is becoming a bit more social (she was sick last week so that may have something to do with it).
I have three class sessions a week - a total of around 6 hours. Classes are interesting (not in the "wow, this is interesting" way) - apart from the class titled "Philosophical foundations of Research" it is mostly a review of stuff that I learned twice over. The other two classes, Statistics and Microeconomics, are not so much giving me new knowledge as they are presenting that information in a different way and showing me how to use those concepts in different settings. We are basically learning how to think about Economics and Statistics as a researcher would. It is all very practical (and hence not all that "interesting").
The Philosophy class is basically teaching us that "A PhD, or Doctor of Philosophy, Is a Person Trained in Research, Able to Advance the Knowledge in Their Field of Interest" (quote taken from a slide from the first class). Now this class is completely new information and so far has been truly interesting. I like it.
The best part of PhD school has been my Mentor/Adviser - she is great. Extremely sharp, very well respected in the field and very much capable of helping me avoid true disillusionment (<---- never used that word before and quite surprised that the spell checker didn't give me a red squiggly line just now). I'll write more about her later but the work that she is assigning to me is quite interesting and she already has some really cool stuff for me to dig into as the Semester continues. She is working on a lot of stuff and really needs assistance getting it all done - an excellent opportunity for me to learn about becoming a "great researcher."
To be continued (or, as they say in Ghana, "watch this space")...
Doc2.0
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