...Oh yeah, I'm done!

Sorry about the lack of posts! Now that I'm done with classes, Devi takes up a lot of my time...so I need to do a quick update and then try to get her back to sleep.

Anyway, here's how the assignments went down. The first assignment was turned in 5 hours late (as I reported two posts ago) but the professor gave me the grade bonus credit anyway. The second assignment was turned in roughly eight hours late, but there's a good chance it was just turned in really early because the official due date was December 9th at midnight, and I didn't know if that meant it had to be in by the end of Monday or the end of Tuesday, so it was done by 8 a.m. Tuesday morning. My last assignments (the big project, the annotated bibliography and the rest of the weekly summaries) was due by 4 p.m. on the 10th but had the unique problem of everything had to be printed out and put in the professor's mailbox (the other two classes wanted the final projects e-mailed). Since my printer was on the fritz, I had to use my printing credits in the graduate lab (something that I would've used sooner if I had realized that I had 250 printing credits per quarter) to print everything out. I also asked my husband to read over the syllabus assignment to see if it sounded like a class he would be interested in [I had to create a class syllabus for a class I would like to teach in the future, so I designed an undergraduate course that would look at graphic novels...a lot of graphic novels.] and he did. Unfortunately, I had to transfer my work to a flash drive, run to campus like a madwoman to print everything out, and then run up one more floor to drop everything off. And, to top it all off, I was an hour late from the deadline! Everything was deposited at 4:58 p.m. and the professor had already picked up everyone else's envelopes. Fortunately, the head of the department was there when I came in (having to use the passcode to get in...got to love being a graduate student) so that there was proof that I didn't just drop everything off the next day and lie about it.

Anyway, let's get to the good part: my grades. For my first quarter in graduate school, I earned two As and a B+. These would've been grades I would be ecstatic to receive if I hadn't heard from the other graduate students at a get-together that "everyone gets As in Graduate school", making my B+ feel a little inadequate. But you know what? I worked damned hard for my grades, and I had a feeling that the class I got the B+ in was going to turn out that way, but I learned so much that I'm not upset. Hell, I thought I was going to get a B, so this was higher than expected. I do need to find out if the B+ was a result of the final project being poor or a result of my low participation in the class. Either way, this class was taught by a woman who had just finished her post-doc at Columbia after getting her PhD at Harvard (and I'm taking another of her classes next quarter) so I thought she may have something to prove, if nothing else.

Now that I've been though my first quarter, I know what to expect and what is expected of me. And I think I can do this. Now I just need to work on my participation in class, my presentation skills, and try to get invited to at least one conference. I won't say that this will be easy, but at least I'm not going to be 100% completely freaked out next quarter. Maybe it will be down to 80%.

Soon, I will need to post pictures. I've taken a ton and want to post them, but I need to find the time to upload them before I can create the next slideshow. I can't believe she's fifteen weeks old already!

Until then, I'll try to get better at posting. She's simmering down so hopefully she'll crash out for the rest of the night. Later, gators ;-)