My original intent had been to blog regularly throughout my program, sharing my experience as a grad student. By ‘regularly’, I had been envisioning weekly.
We’re now five weeks into the fourth course, and this is the first time I’m writing about it.
That tells you about all you need to know.
One course isn’t quite like another
The workload in my current course is much greater than in the course we took from September to mid-November, and I wasn’t exactly ready for the change. Every week, we’re expected to do our readings, annotate those readings using Hypothes.is, write a blog post about those readings, and we meet virtually for an hour every week for ‘class’. Our major assignment for the course is a literature review, but instead of having a full month with no other coursework to work on it, we have to figure out how to get it done on top of our weekly workload.
If I’m being honest, I like this workload more. It feels as though I’m learning more and engaging more. But I’m admittedly also struggling more.
Trying to stay afloat
Five weeks into the course, I haven’t actually written and published a single blog post yet. I’ve barely thought about my literature review at all. I’m getting the readings done, but even that has felt down-to-the-finish line sometimes.
It hasn’t helped that, since basically the beginning of this course, work has been a little out of control. Our January Orientation planning somehow made its way onto my plate, and ensuring that the program happened took a lot of time and energy. The lines between work and life blurred for a little while. Now that that’s out of the way, I’m hoping I can restructure my time to fit grad school in more easily, and start checking some of these overdue items off the list.
Featured image by Ian Espinosa on Unsplash
And this third course can take even more time! Good luck!