I said an odd thing this morning: "My defense is next Thursday."
Up until this point, I had always mentioned the date of my defense as a date--July 2nd. July 2nd. This nebulous thing that I was at once excited for and terrified of. But this morning, I used words which put it in a concrete frame of time.
I am close enough to the date of my defense now that I can say things like "next week." I am close enough now that I realized last night with a skip of my heart that I needed to figure out what to wear so I can make sure what I want to wear is clean! (Good thing too, as I decided to wear a skirt which requires dry cleaning.)
It's hard to describe, but I feel like this will be a very important day for me, one that means so much. I started graduate school 5.5 years ago. When I left after a year, I felt utterly lost. I felt like a failure. Everyone else continued on to do what they had set out to do: write and defend their work. Me? I got a part-time job mixing blue goo in a pole barn and sticking it into a spectrometer. How lame.
But then I did other things. Important and valuable things. To me. Important and valuable things to me. I volunteered with college students, and guided them and watched them as they followed Jesus, and then I went abroad and taught English to some teenagers and left a little piece of my heart in Russia. And then I came back and did this absurd thing: I started teaching college students chemistry. What.
And then I did another scary thing: I went back to graduate school. I voluntarily stuck my foot back into the world of academia, the world where I felt I had failed SO spectacularly.
And now...I'm here. My defense date is at hand. I have NOT failed. Instead, I have grown and thrived, and fallen in love with what I'm doing. I am happy.
And my defense is next Thursday.
Up until this point, I had always mentioned the date of my defense as a date--July 2nd. July 2nd. This nebulous thing that I was at once excited for and terrified of. But this morning, I used words which put it in a concrete frame of time.
I am close enough to the date of my defense now that I can say things like "next week." I am close enough now that I realized last night with a skip of my heart that I needed to figure out what to wear so I can make sure what I want to wear is clean! (Good thing too, as I decided to wear a skirt which requires dry cleaning.)
It's hard to describe, but I feel like this will be a very important day for me, one that means so much. I started graduate school 5.5 years ago. When I left after a year, I felt utterly lost. I felt like a failure. Everyone else continued on to do what they had set out to do: write and defend their work. Me? I got a part-time job mixing blue goo in a pole barn and sticking it into a spectrometer. How lame.
But then I did other things. Important and valuable things. To me. Important and valuable things to me. I volunteered with college students, and guided them and watched them as they followed Jesus, and then I went abroad and taught English to some teenagers and left a little piece of my heart in Russia. And then I came back and did this absurd thing: I started teaching college students chemistry. What.
And then I did another scary thing: I went back to graduate school. I voluntarily stuck my foot back into the world of academia, the world where I felt I had failed SO spectacularly.
And now...I'm here. My defense date is at hand. I have NOT failed. Instead, I have grown and thrived, and fallen in love with what I'm doing. I am happy.
And my defense is next Thursday.
