"What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies."

Quote from Aristotle, a Greek philosopher who was a student of Plato and a writer on many subjects, perhaps the most famous being his works on the formal study of logic and the physical sciences.


[I wrote this yesterday but in between meetings and programs in the evening it didn't get posted.]


Today was a day of blogging – both reading and writing. I’ve been amusing myself in between appointments and meetings by reading a blog written by one of my staff members this summer while he traveled abroad. Then I decided to wander over to studentaffairs.com to see if anything new was up, and I discovered the graduate student blog and read that. Man, did that take me back. The ‘Takin’ Care of Business’ blogger sounds exactly like me when I first started my program two years ago. I can remember feeling incredibly lost in classes, watching all these second years (and more assertive first years) interacting and commenting on issues that I hadn’t even thought of. I had been interested in student affairs for a good year (at least) before I started the program, but coming from a small residence life program (and a small institution in general) left me way behind in many ways. It wasn’t until my second year of grad school that I really started to feel competent. Things started making sense, I started having more things to say, and suddenly I was feeling like a real professional. But back in the first year, in those beginning days, I was miserable.

I picked up and moved for school and the only person I knew in the area was the guy I was dating at the time. He didn’t support me in my pursuit of a masters degree and had little patience listening to me whine about all the work and the awful time I was having. A month after classes began we went our separate ways. I would leave class feeling defeated and spend parts of the drive home crying about what I should do about my life. As I started to make friends things got better, and after the first semester (when I took the worst combination of classes that anyone in my program could possibly take) things got much easier.

Which is why when you go back and read my parts of the 2008 Job Search blog I was so devastated to move away and leave all of that behind. And that’s also why I still have a hard time coping with being away from the past two years of my life. So fear not, those grad students out there who might be feeling something similar, it will all fall into place. You just have to push your way through the bad in order to reach all the good.

Life these days has been rather interesting. I’m developing the sickness that most of those around me have already had. This makes it hard to concentrate and feel like my usual peppy and upbeat self. I’m having students miss or cancel appointments at a rapid rate – something that I have no patience for, or tolerance, and that my schedule cannot accommodate. My staff has started programming at a rapid rate, and so my building had a program last night, another one tonight, something tomorrow night, and another is already planned for next week. As they find their groove I know things will only get more active and fun around here. I knew my “pep talk” that I gave them a few weeks ago would pay off eventually.

So I’ve been my usual busy self, but I’m finding more down time during the days than I anticipated. This is in part because of the appointment woes that I mentioned, but also because I’m actually (dare I say it?) ahead of the game. My desk is clean and free from all the random papers that I’ve just been pushing around. I have neat piles of important things and my files have been organized. My office has been rearranged (I got sick of it after less than two months) and I feel like it’s a lot more user-friendly for myself and the students. I am caught up on email and have even cleared out my inbox from random other things that were hanging out there. While I know that this won’t last, and as my schedule heats up even more I will probably lose this calm and confident feeling, for now I will enjoy the fact that I am a cool and collected professional, ready to conquer the world!