Perpetual Change

A day in the Life of a Graduate Student

It is hard to do an average day in my current lifestyle. Even more so than when I work for Backroads, and you would think college students live a pretty stable and consistent life. The other day I had one that captured almost everything I do.

Wednesday, Jan 12

7:30 am - biked to my new internship. It was unreasonably cold. I wished I had full fingers on my gloves. I am working 27 hours per week for Refugee Resettlement services at Catholic Charities. They have the DCF contract (and grant) to provide services in the panhandle, which has been designated as a national reception site for refugees and asylum seekers.

It was only my third day, so I did some training and asked a lot of questions. The previous day I attended an assessment of services for a new client conducted in Spanish. I understood everything but one bit that my supervisor (from Columbia) said, but no responses of the client (from Cuba).

10:30 am - biked back to school. I stashed my bike inside the R&D department, because I don't trust leaving it outside (yesterday, the girl at the grocery check out line asked why I had my bike seat and post with me; it is harder to steal it or the bike that way.) I checked my email for a last minute catch up on our group assignment's progress. Then I ran downstairs and met the group in class, two minutes before the start.

11 am - listened to a lecture in "Mental Health and Child Welfare". The presenter heads a study center on Infant Mental Health. The talk was on child development, and was very interesting. I asked several questions, and spoke to her during the break. She was interested in making a professional connection (everyone in this field is so friendly), and she invited me to a symposium on attachment (a hot topic in child development, particularly in relation to foster care).

2 pm - went to work in my professor's office for R&D. We chatted some about theory (of everything), as I worked to extract psychophysiological measures from a study he did on substance abuser's attentional bias. I am trying to process Galvanic Skin Responses, which is the conductivity of your skin based on the amount of sweat your fingers are perspiring. It is considered of measure of your stress/anxiety. Another professor stopped by while I was working. He still hasn't given me a paper back from last semester (not sure he has read it, but i got full credit on it. Thanks anyway, to those of you that struggled through my report on "Quixote's Ghost"); he told the other professor to keep an eye on me.

5 pm - went to field meeting. This is when things got hectic. I was supposed to go to a pizza social at the President's house for graduate fellows (I have a teaching fellowship, but in Social Work, graduate students do not teach; that is why I work on research); however, we have a seminar class that corresponds to our experience in our internship, and it was set just two days before, and corresponed for the exact same time. I had packed a lunch, but not really had time to finish it. I didn't think that the seminar would last that long, but in fact, it lasted the whole time until 7. And then, the professor wanted to talk to me for a few minutes after because she didn't think my agency was living up to her expectations (I appreciated the attention; my stomach did not).

7:45 pm - got home. I was rather hungry at this point and having missed the pizza, I made leftovers. I was also tired, so I finished a book I was reading (Oryx and Crake), and went to bed early.

However, the night before, I had a similar day, but ran home at 5 to bike 6 miles out to a neighborhood where I had been invited to dinner. I was a guest at one of the host families for the Ukrainian orphans. We had a lovely dinner with the parents, their two girls and the Ukrainian 15 year old. Steak and Ukr mashed potatoes. Felt like a little bit of home - both with my parents, and my time over in Ukraine. I translated for about 4 hours, in which we covered career planning, keeping in touch, gifts for the director, school, family history, etc. I wanted her to help me create a grammatically correct evaluation of their stay, but the family drove me home in exhaustion before we got to it.

Sleep tight.

Labels: average day

posted by jjs @ 6:43 PM