Well, the long-awaited first day happened. After years of preparing and months of thinking through how to make sure my life was ready to be a doctoral student, the first day of class came and went. Maybe it was because I was very prepared, but it seemed much less scary than I imagined it would . I've looked at most of the syllabi at this point, and I'm not scared. They seem on par with the amount of work I've always done. I'm glad I didn't get rid of my part-time job or lose too much sleep. Today's class was fun (yay for small class sizes and finally being in the inner-sanctum of know-it-alls), but it wasn't hard. I keep reminding myself that maybe by the end of the week I will realize I'm in over my head. Or maybe I'm actually ready for this. Maybe the hammer isn't going to fall this semester. We will see.
This is not to say it won't be incredibly time-consuming or that I won't wish that I was not in grad school at some point. But working most of my days and nights and weekends is how my life has been since the fourth grade, except for a few years when I had a regular job and I filled the boring hours of free-time with much more interesting community service. So maybe my life really is ready for my doctorate and maybe this won't be the most challenging two years of my life.
Either way, today was fun. I got to talk about interesting things, read about interesting things, and dream about all of the ideas I can write about and questions I can answer. Being a social scientist is going to rock.
Update: By day 4, I felt like my research agenda was completely useless.
Update 2: By day 7, I felt okay again. Let's see if I live on a 3-day sin curve for the rest of grad school. I'm hoping it's a few more than 3 days, but hey.
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