remembering how to be a student

Posted 09:56 AM, September 12, 2006, by antilles

Our boxes are almost all unpacked, and we've hung up most of our framed photos. Now I really feel moved in.

This leaves me with more time to think about the upcoming school year. Well, maybe it would be more accurate to say that I worry.

I've been out of school for about 3 years now. The last class I took was over 3.5 years ago, while doing my master's at MIT. The last semester I took more than 3 classes was about 5 years ago, during the first trimester of my senior year at Caltech.

This is not to say that I don't remember how to study. Last fall, I spent about 2 months studying for the Bio GRE, and that went well. And I sat in on a molecular/cellular biology class at MIT a little over a year ago and was able to absorb information from the lectures.

This is not to say that I am not looking forward to my new classes. Unlike most of my classmates, I am not coming from a biology background, so I definitely feel that my classes will be useful, informative, and interesting.

But even with all that in consideration, I am anxious. I haven't pulled an all nighter since I finished my master's thesis. I need my 8 hours of sleep. I'm not a young whippersnapper of 21 anymore.

In any case, I like to think that my age at least gives me a bit more focus, and a little added experience about the world in general. I've watched my husband go through the entire grad school experience, and I definitely feel I've learned something about how to be a grad student from him. And of course, my 3 years as a scientist at a company, and then as a lab tech in an immunology lab, will surely help me a ton when I start in on my thesis.

But classes. They still make me nervous.