Year 1 Week 4 Recap

Wow, no updates all week. Sorry Mom!

To put it succinctly, I was busy this week. Funny thing is, I have no idea where the time went, although I suspect it got sucked up by teaching duties. Nothing too unusual happened. Monday was as expected: teaching from noon till 9:20pm. I feel like I'm starting to gain the energy to do this without being tired for the rest of the week. I didn't get a sore throat this time from talking for 9 hours! That's an improvement in itself. It's really a pain the way my week is structured, it's really heavily weighted at the beginning with teaching and my own classes. Although, I do appreciate my very open Fridays.

I have all my grading done, and I've put in 16 hours of teaching assistant related stuff so far this week. All I need to do is write my quiz for next lab, and I'm good for between now and noon on Monday.

I had my first test this week. Okay, let me rephrase that: I had my first test in four years. Granted, it was sent via email, and it is a take home, and it isn't due until Tuesday of next week; but, it's been a while since I've had my skills evaluated in any form other than a paper or project. Had I stuck it out with Rudy's evil sedimentology class, I would have had an exam about 2 years ago during the first year of my master's degree; but, I dropped that insanity before he had the chance. That class was a test in itself: a test of endurance, and a test in how much could you take before you broke down.


This weekend will consist of me trying to scrape together more sources of travel funding for my upcoming trip to Pittsburgh. I'm headed there in October for the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists meeting. I've given talks before, but not at this particular meeting, so it's kind of a big deal for me. I'll also get to reconnect with Penn State people at the meeting.

Someone from the Biology Graduate Student Association is throwing a party this evening: the fall BGSA party. I don't think it is necessarily a department sponsored event, just that the people in that group happen to be organizing it. A lot of the new students are going, and I'm hoping to meet some people that I haven't met yet. I think that, based on the people I've already interacted with, it'll be a good time. Of course, I've never hung out with biologists, only geologists. And geologists are pretty crazy partiers. The only thing crazier than a geologist, in my experience, is a paleontologist. So basically, I don't know what to expect from these "studiers of the living".

Till later, or as I have heard people say in New Mexico, hasta.
Mel