On April 23 at 6:28 pm I officially completed my first year of graduate school. It was tough, intellectually challenging, sleep depriving, stress inducing, financially draining, headache creating, and even at times fun. I learned so much about myself and most of all I truly feel that this is the field in which I am called to serve.
Because I now have free time I've been spending some of it reflecting back on all that I've learned in the last year and I thought I would share some of it.
1. As you get older your brain really does start to retain information at a less convenient rate. This is especially important to know when studying for tests because studying 6 hours before that test might not yield maximum information storage.
2. It is not a good idea to wait until the night before to write a 10 page paper on epidemologic fallacies in a specific research paper. 10 page papers take more than 2 hours to write and staying up all night to write a paper will throw off your body for the next week.
3. Science is not perfect, it doesn't always work. This perhaps is one of the most important lessons I learned this year. I started working in my first "real" lab job, where I got to put on a white lab coat and play with bacteria. I remember all the times I heard about Thomas Edison trying 999 times to invent the light bulb and on the 1000 try he go it to work, I however never fully appreciated this statement. I have spent the last year running experiments that don't work. However, the most frustrating part was this last semester when I spent 4 months (76 hours total in a semester when my course load was 17 credits) tying to get a simple experiment which used to work, working again. I kept getting no results until the absolute last week of the semester when all the components of the experiment began to work again. Needless to say my happiness exceeded any possible description, which leads into point 4.
4. "All things work together for good". I've had many instances of times this last year when I started to seriously question my decision to come to grad school. When going through these times God always did something to remind me that he has me here for a reason. It's hard to describe what the peace of God feels like but I know that I've felt it during this last year.
5. Statistics are bad, linnear regression is worse, and whoever invented SAS well lets just say he doesn't deserve a pat on the back.
So these are just a few of the things that I've learned over the past year. It's hard to believe that this time next year I'll be done with this adventure.
