First Week of Grad School

Tommy had a friend spend the night Sunday night so I crammed three boys into my Mustang to take them off to school and get into UofM to my grad assistant office. This is my long day – no classes, just G.A. stuff. I went to the library at lunch to do a bit of reading and couldn’t resist an Einstein Bros frozen pumpkin pie something-or-other drink. 

First day of class! G.A. stuff in the morning and then my first class: Psych Ed Assessment I. This is the where-the-rubber-meets-the-road class. If I make it through this one, the road is a bit easier the rest of the way. Thirteen administrations of around seven different tests over the course of the semester – testing and writing up the reports. Also, we’re doing weekly reading logs and we got half a batch of test booklets and the rest I purchased at the office. So already on day one I’ve got a buttload of papers on my hands. 

G.A. stuff in the morning, lab for an hour (that goes along with Psych Ed Assessment), and my next class: Intro to School Psych. In the lab, we each got two bags of test kits, along with a reminder of just how much these things cost so please keep up with them if you don’t want to pay for them. You break it, you buy it. And more paperwork. And a little bit of math which succeeded in confusing everyone. 

My Intro to School Psych class? We’re reading 40 journal articles over the course of the semester, doing a summary on a couple of Who’s Who and Who Was Who folks in the school psychology field, and doing a project on a certain topic. My topic happened to have the longest presentation time which I found out today. By the time I get done researching and all that wonderful stuff, I get to stand in front of the class towards the end of the semester and give an hour-and-a-half presentation. Yeah. AN HOUR AND A HALF. Oh yeah, and I got an expanded folder filled with research for that. So my car looked like this that afternoon:

Which prompted me to buy this:

Developmental Psych! This one involves 49 journal readings with reflective summaries of each and about three papers. Then I have my G.A. stuff. 

Right now they’re free, but that’s fixing to change as we’ve got another project to do each week for my Intro to School Psych class. BUT, we got to eat cake and cookies and we got coffee and I was nice and sugared up for the afternoon. 

That pretty much sums up my first week of grad school. It’s past my bedtime and I’m beyond sleepy, but I wanted to post a little something about my first week. I’m sure I’ll think of some funny stuff that happened to add later. Speaking of funny stuff, I do have a little thing to add. So for the last month and a half, we’ve had a gaggle/group/gang of turkeys roaming around our little spot and I posted a video of them one morning. They were on our driveway and I startled them when I drove up. They forgot they could fly and the result was just hilarious: