Day Twenty Six

First day of graduate school tomorrow! It's hard to believe that after 5 years of hard work in undergrad and an entire summer of anticipation, the moment is finally here. Time to battle it out for parking with other undergraduate and graduate students, teach my own group of students in analytical lab, and wander around this gigantic, gorgeous campus every day. Here's to hoping I find parking every day and don't get horribly, horribly lost.

I had to be on campus by 9am today, and left at 7:40am in anticipation of grade school and work day traffic. I definitely hit some back-ups, but still made it to my parking lot at UT at 8:10am. The shuttle wasn't planned to come until 8:30am. Fantastic. I just sat in my car, listened to music for 15 minutes, and seemingly confused the maintenance men working around the baseball stadium and parking lot. I know guys, I got here waaay early, just bear with me because it'll probably happen again. The shuttle eventually came, and I made my first successful UT shuttle ride. Victory! The East Campus shuttle let me off about 3 blocks away from my building, which I was pretty pleased about.

UT Shuttle - where I will spend quite a bit of time on while I'm on campus
(because this campus is way too huge to try and just commute on foot).

I had TA training from 9am - 11am, where we were all reminded of how to use a few of the analytical instruments that will be the main focus of some of the labs. Unfortunately, none of these instrumental labs happen until the 4th week of class, which means I'll likely remember nothing from what I learned today by the time these particular labs roll around. Oh well, I guess it'll just be a learning experience in lab for both the students and the TA! We also learned that all of the TAs will be introduced to the students (all 100+ of them) in lecture on Thursday. Since I was just recently an undergrad, I know I don't have to worry about this moment, because not a single one of them will be paying attention to our introduction and likely won't remember any of the TA's names.

After training, I went to get my keys! I now have 5 UT-related keys. Good thing I bought a separate key ring for all of them. And three of them look identical - that should be fun. But now I can get into Welch and my office whenever I want. Woohoo!

The rest of the day proved to be surprisingly busy (after my early afternoon nap, of course). I went to the post office, did the dishes, did laundry, filled out Texas residency paperwork, took online training modules for grad school, cooked dinner, and more. Life is busy, and things will only intensify once everything gets under way with school tomorrow. Bring it on.