The truly educated never graduate ... because they never escape grad school

This is the part where it's a picnic, right? Being a grad student, living that envied life, short hours, fewer classes, being paid to study. It's all one big non-stop walk in the park. Perhaps if I tell myself that enough times I'll start to believe it.

All of which is not to say I dislike grad school. Quite the contrary. It's fun to be in school, taking classes I like and not being subjected to boring, irrelevant graduation requirements (foreign languages notwithstanding). And I enjoy being around a bunch of other budding historians, genuinely smart people who sincerely love history and discuss it passionately. For one thing, it makes me feel like I'm the cool one when I think they talk history too much at happy hour and I think we should regress to more mundane subjects. Plus, it is pretty sweet to think that I'll make a good bit more this year as a student than I did last year working full-time. Not to mention that I have health benefits (and good ones at that), two weeks of vacation at the holidays, another one in the spring and summers off. Then there's the matter of actually doing what I want to be doing in life. Not once have I woken up in the morning and wanted nothing more than to turn off the alarm and go back to bed so I can avoid trudging to school once more. This may seem like I'm speaking too soon, given that I've had exactly four weeks of class so far, but it took precisely three days at my first post-school job to realize the working world wasn't for me. I worry about getting my classwork done, deciding on my Ph.D. fields, thinking about M.A. exams, finding fellowships for research abroad and to write up my dissertation, finishing the dissertation and getting a job. But these aren't paralyzing fears. Just things that occasionally cross my mind. For the most part, I just get busy and cease to think about them.

Ah, the busy-ness. It never ceases. I've found no real trouble keeping up with course readings or my Czech homework. Czech takes only a few minutes a day and course readings I can do on autopilot. It's the research and reading for my papers that really gets me. Reading critically, while good and important, is rather time intensive. And while I'd love to be able to devote a couple of hours or so to every chapter, it isn't exactly conducive to make great leaps of progress. I'm hoping I'll be able to motor through it a bit quicker once I get my topics more defined and can be keying in on specific things, but there's no guarantee.

Then there's the job. Tutoring is great. Helping people write history papers and getting paid to do it is an incredibly sweet gig for me. Granted, most of the papers I read need serious help (an incredibly high percentage lack a proper thesis and topic sentences that serve their purpose), but I like to think my comments are helpful, that they'll help students improve on the paper in question and maybe, just maybe they'll get some of these ideas about thesis statements and topic sentences stuck in their heads so they'll be thinking about and doing these things in the future. And the job pays handsomely. It augments my fellowship nicely, well enough to allow me to afford a nice trip to Ireland come Spring Break. Though I could certainly use the 15 hours a week for my own studies.

Still, there's a lot to be happy about. My adviser seems great; I think he's a good fit and a good adviser. I like my department. I like the other history grads. I like the school. Seattle's even pretty nice (though I do miss many aspects of Chicago -- think deep dish pizza; flat, easily biked terrain, the diversity of neighborhoods, the diversity of ethnic neighborhoods, etc.). And, if I can swing a summer FLAS, I'll actually end up getting paid to spend a month in the Czech Republic studying language. Yeah, that's exceedingly cool.