Well, that was fast. One moment, it was mid-March and a hundred different things were happening. I was trying to mentally sum up all the loose ends leading to the spring. And all of a sudden, it’s the end of April. I’m saying goodbye to some of my best new friends. I’m packing up the apartment for the summer. And I’m a year older and halfway through this graduate degree. Every time I express that surprise, a staff member or a second-year smiles at me, and tells me the second year goes faster. I guess I expected time to go fast, but I’m dismayed I haven’t been able to track it as well as I wanted to. I wanted many more moments of introspection, more moments where I could step back and say, “I should do this because I won’t get to do it again.” There were too many times when I assumed I’d have many months and weeks to get to know a professor or a classmate. Times when I didn’t realize time and the opportunity of graduate was passing. Here is another time passing, and here is another chance to step back.
Just two weeks ago, we were in Greenville with my boyfriend’s family, packing our bags and saying goodbye to our dog. On May 7, we boarded a plane to Dallas, and then to Hong Kong (a mind-numbing 17-hour flight), and eventually to Taipei. We arrived in Taichung, found an apartment, and I started my summer internship last week on May 12, so here goes the wrap-up for my first year of graduate school.
Classes-wise, things went all right. I found out last week that my GPA’s gone down by a tenth, but I’m not going for a PhD, and just who is tracking it all? A 3.7 is as much as anything, I figure! I ended up having a heck of a time wrestling with our spring consulting project. I liked the process of the work that I did, I liked working with the data and trying to learn more, but it was a frustrating groupwork experience. Only three-quarters of the way through did I realize that there wasn’t quite a driver at the wheel. Or that driver was just me, and everyone else was happy to come along for the ride. No one else really cared very much about our project matter, after all. It’s also hard to be self-aware, self-critical, and also critical of everyone else all at the same time, if that makes any sense. Our final draft was critiqued for being essentially a data-dump, with lots of information and very little analysis. The state of that product reflected how our group liked to work – we could find out lots of information, but when it came down analyzing that data critically and really saying what was the right choice or not given a certain set of criteria, we fell silent. I came out with a B+, and I’m fine with it, given the process that we went through.
Statistics was also frustrating, but immensely interesting. Frustrating because reading complex empirical papers, learning how to deconstruct statistics, read endnotes and graphs, and critique a methodological approach is difficult as hell. But immensely interesting because by the end of the whole semester, my head feels like it’s been crammed full of odds and ends about all these papers, and there’s no way the final exam can encompass all of those things! I got a B+ in it, and it’s funny because I’m about to embark on a program evaluation and statistical analysis project this summer. Fun!
Schools and social policy was a fun class in my opinion. I was a little disappointed to get an A-, but to be frank, I spent less time than I could have working on memos, papers, and the final project. I did develop however a really deep appreciation for education policy. Many times, I’ve heard educators bemoan the fact that people who had not spent a day in the classroom were creating and setting education policy; but by the end of this semester, I had determined that if that was true, then the reverse was equally true: people with only classroom experience could not do the same job of creating and setting education policy. Understanding how individuals react under a certain policy or rule is important, but so is knowing how to craft policies and rules that need to apply to a large population of people. Understanding what lines to draw, how to come up with proper proxies for them, and creating good policy that is necessarily imperfect, are all immensely important and hard to do. Education policy is important worth studying in and of itself.
Finally, I’m really glad to say I got an A in microeconomics this semester. I really enjoyed the class, and put a good deal of effort into the class. Sunny was a great professor, even if she wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. The class was appropriately difficult, challenged me to use the microeconomic framework of costs and benefits and consider the tradeoffs between equity and efficiency. I enjoyed writing memos for the class, and also found it easy to discuss the concepts. I stepped away from the semester very confident in what I had found.
I also need to take some time to discuss student groups this semester, and what I want to devote myself to next year. I simply adore getting involved in extracurricular activities, as I always have. This year, I’ve devoted most of my time to two organizations and also a few side gigs. The most important is undoubtedly Bridging Communities (BC), which is a student group dedicated to creating socially conscious policy makers and celebrating and promoting diversity, especially racial. I was initially introduced to it as a good way to gather people to service and volunteering events, but as the year went on, we started taking a more proactive approach toward helping educate and bring awareness to certain issues. Several racial incidents at the university served as a reminder that BC can be a rallying point for people who care about racial diversity, because after all, our school isn’t as diverse as we want it to be, and can be even better! So I got more involved, helped create the budget and funding request for next year, and will serve as Treasurer next year. I look forward to doing a lot more as a part of this group. The other group is Sanford Women in Policy (SWP). Working with women’s groups can always be tricky. Under myself and one of my classmates, I think SWP will be pivoting to a different sort of focus next year. We’ve focused so far mostly on women’s professional development in the policy arena. Some events with alumni have been great, but we haven’t been as active as we’d like to be, and I think not as inclusive as we could be. Next year, one of the focuses will be to focus on gender policy issues and engage more men, to reflect the fact that everyone must be behind gender equality in order for things to really change! Finally, I have a few miscellaneous projects. I moonlighted as a photographer once this semester for the communications department, which was a really good experience. I also have been tweeting with them, and I really like the people I’ve gotten to know through that. I also have it in my head to do some project around interviewing alumni about their work which would be really amazing to do with the school career services staff. They and the communications staff are both interested, so it could be a really great thing. It’s an idea I’ve had in my head since forever, and would be an ideal thing to do in the future! To speak nothing of my master’s project and other pursuits…
I’ll leave my internship and career thoughts for another time, perhaps when I’m further into my ten weeks in Taiwan. Suffice it to say that my expectations have been exceeded here thus far, and we are enjoying amazing food and drink. I know the summer will pass all too quickly!
The Myth of America 