Oh man. Already off to a bad start. So much for me writing
anywhere near regularly, eh?
So I’m in Virginia now. A little town called Blacksburg. You
may have never heard of it. I actually didn’t know anything about it until
about two months ago when I had to find an apartment here. It’s isolated, to
say the least. I’m effectively trapped here, with no airport, bus station,
train station…nothing. Not that that’s going to be such a bad thing for the
most part…I’m so swamped! Grad school is already kicking my butt. I’m pretty
sure a lot of that has to do with the fact that I spent the first half of my
senior year in undergrad systematically destroying any semblance of being a
good student while I was in Russia. Add a year and a half of chillin' at home/playing homemaker…and
I can’t study / write / manage time worth a damn. So what do I do? Naturally I
try and make my life extra hard. I’m taking three grad classes, two of which
are going to be awesome, the other one redeemed only by my new friend (more
later). I’m also in third year Russian (they tried to put me in second year,
but when I went to class, I was nothing short of horrified…). And the icing on
the cake? I’m a teaching assistant for a political science professor. Political
Theory. AKA “not my strong point”. The prof’s cool at least. She’s from
Germany. And “eccentric”, like professors do. Yeah, so my time is pretty much
well-accounted for.
So, an unabbreviated rundown of my first week as a graduate
student of Governance and International Affairs at Virginia Tech. I was
registered for two classes with a Dr. Rupa Thadani. Turns out she took
last-minute leave, for at least this semester (which, turns out, freed up funds so I got my assistantship!). My first class, Collaborative
Governance, was one of those classes, so we have some random prof. He. Is.
Awesome. He looks like a hobbit and has an awesome sense of humor. Plus he let
us design the syllabus, which resulted in front-loading the reading for the
first month, two case studies in the middle, and the last three weeks? Cake. I
think we have one reading review in that time. And our final exam is going to
be a take-home essay (that we’ll get several weeks before it’s due). Five
pages. So we can get our shit together for our classes with the more sadistic
professors. The other class Thadani should have taught is Contemporary
Political Theory, which is now being taught by the GIA department chair. He’s
awesome too. I met him previously regarding my teaching assistantship.
The readings are kind of meh, but Thadani picked them, not him. The other
class? US Policy and something else I don’t care about. Anyone who’s heard me
talk about politics knows that I avoid US politics like the plague. Just not my
thing. So of course what will likely be my most frustrating class is on that
subject. The professor doesn’t believe in ordering books through the bookstore
so she gave us the reading list the first day of class…like 1800 last Tuesday.
We have to have a book read by tomorrow. So the next morning I ordered it…yeah,
it won’t be here until next Tuesday. Fail. She could have been a responsible
professor and emailed the syllabus/reading list ahead of time, so we could get
our books in a timely manner. Not so much.
Like I said, that last class does have a redeeming factor.
My partner for our term project is second in command at VT’s NROTC. And he’s
about the nicest guy ever. He’s seeing what he can do to help me with my little
recruiter issue…so I have contact information now for VT’s officer recruiter,
and he’s going to look into what can be done about my waivers (once I get a
copy of my files from Seattle NRD…). It’s really cool that he would go out of
his way like that when we’ve met like, you know, once. Nothing in it for him
(except another AWESOME naval aviator!). That pretty much made my Tuesday last
week. Still pissed about that book though…
I’m decidedly disappointed in VT’s Russian program. I mean,
the class I’m in now is at a good level for me. Then again, I haven’t spoken
Russian in a year and a half, and they’re third year students. The professor
described how last year’s class was “more advanced” and at the beginning of the
year was studying verbs of motion (instead of going back to basics like we are
now). Pretty sure I studied verbs of motion during my second year. The second
year students here sound like they’ve been studying Russian for maybe a month.
Granted, they just got back from summer vacay, but still. And their textbook,
for most of the year, is the text we used first year. It was about my favorite Russian
textbook ever, but it’s just not a high level book at all. The professor for
the third year class is pretty cool though. He’s not Vajda, but he’s still
awesome. He does let things slide a little too much, I think, feeding students
answers so they aren’t forced to think about what they’re doing. Kind of a
disservice to them. But whatever.
So in about five minutes I’ve written a longer blog post
than the paper I worked like five hours on yesterday. Hah. Yeah yeah, I’m a
little rusty on the academic stuff…hopefully it comes back! I’m already doing
better on the reading side. Now I just need to step up the writing so it sounds
like I actually read the damn books. Speaking of reading books…my reading list…oh
my God. By December, I should have read 35-40 books. Now, they’re not massive
textbooks or anything, but it’s still very dense material. And it’s political
science. Suuuuper exciting stuff. Anyways, my time here in the office (yeah, I
have an office haha) is about up and I’m all sorts of excited to get home. More
later! Probably in a smaller dose at least…
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