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What's Going On This Week I take the GRE general test on Monday morning at 8, if you've been wondering where I've been lately. I've been in practice test hell, learning that I rush through most of the questions and my practice test scores are reflecting same; I've been curled up in bed with my flash cards; I've been sitting at the dining room table reading the damn Princeton Review book over and over. I've barely thought about the essay part at all; I am consumed with the stupid thirty question verbal section that I am currently sucking at big time. I also started temping today. The nonprofit I'm temping for actually wanted me permanently from the getgo, but I had a really good interview somewhere last week and I'm holding out hope that I get that job. The nonprofit can only afford someone for 24 hours a week right now. If I don't get the other job, I'll stay at the nonprofit, hope their budget constraints ease (they're hoping to have the extra money by Christmas), and casually look for a different (full-time) job in the meantime. I really, really, really like the people at the nonprofit, the drive is easy, the pay is good (and would be very good if I was full-time), it's a casual environment, and they're very flexible. So those parts are very good, and if nothing else, it's a good temp gig and some money in our seriously sad little bank account (thank you, wedding and honeymoon). (Speaking of which, gifts continue to arrive sporadically. This bemuses me, because although people say there is a "grace period" of a year after the wedding to send a present, this is actually not true according to Emily Post and other paragons of etiquette. Don't get me wrong - we stopped expecting presents the day of the party! I don't have a checklist or anything! And it is still very fun and exciting to occasionally open the door and see the big white Crate & Barrel boxes. I am just very surprised, every time.) I got an actual full-time job offer on Friday and turned it down Monday. The money was good and I would have been working in the city at a publishing company where two good friends work, but they were inflexible when it came to my classes. This job would have involved my traveling to 10-15 medical conferences a year (to places like Chicago and San Diego and New Orleans and Boston and Denver, which would have been a very good thing), but they weren't willing to keep me in town on Tuesdays through December so I could graduate. Um...sorry, then. My degree is the priority. It's taken me thirteen years to get it, I'm three credits away, and I'm going to stop now? I don't think so. Speaking of my classes, I just want them to be over. I'm not enjoying my writing intensive seminar at all. I think the professor's brilliant, and she obviously has huge enthusiasm for the material and her presentations are well thought out and interesting, but there are other issues afoot. We're expected to read the freaking MLA Handbook, a chapter a week (I'm not doing it). Every week we're going over how-to-write-a-research-paper remedial stuff that we learned in our first seminar and the required how-to-write-a-research-paper class that's a prerequisite for both. I imagine this might be born out of the professor's frustration with papers of the past, but it's boring the crap out of me and at this point in our English major lives, if we can't write a research paper it's our problem. If you don't know how to outline and think of topics and write a thesis statement and look things up in the MLA Handbook by now, then you shouldn't be an English major. I know how to write, I know how to cite, and I want to finish my paper and just graduate. There's been a mixup with some of our books and they've been a pain to get. I also haven't felt a connection to any of the material we've read so far, most of which dates back to just after Partition (this is an IndoPak seminar). The books I'm most interested in reading/possibly writing on are The God of Small Things and Midnight's Children, and they're the last two books of the semester. By the time we officially get to them, my topic will have had to be long chosen - so I'm skipping ahead, and reading them now. I need to get an A- in this class to keep my 3.87 and graduate summa cum laude, so I need to write a really, really good paper. I don't doubt I can do it, but to do it, I really need a topic I like. Thus, the advance reading. This will be easier because I'm dropping the Romanticism course. Naturally, this decision is made after it's too late to get any percentage of my tuition back. I think my problem with this course is in the professor's style. I've had him three times before and his lecture-based style has always worked for me in the past, but it doesn't in this case. I want to discuss these poems. I don't necessarily need to say anything, but I want there to be class discussion. We're also going over them too fast. There are too many on the syllabus and there's no time to really stop and savor anything. I need to do these poems in graduate-level seminars. I'm unhappy, and I don't need it to graduate. The two exams will take up a lot of study time that I could use to work on my seminar paper. The nonprofit really wants me a full day on Wednesdays, and it would be hard if not impossible to do that and get to class on time. So I'm going to drop it. I left a message on Dr. C's machine today telling him I needed to figure out when I could get him to sign the form. I'll miss it a little, and I'll miss a girl in the class that I really like, but those things are not good enough reasons to stay in. There will be Romanticism in grad school. If I get in. Excuse me. I have to get back to my flash cards. |