Two and a half weeks ago, my life took a new turn. One I’ve been expecting for a while, but that took a while to manifest itself. After graduating from Gordon College last spring, I set my sights first on traveling to China, then to enjoying a summer off, and then to graduate school at Michigan State University. Graduate school seemed like a big question mark in my head looming way off in the distance for so long, but then August 10th rolled around and I was driving, with all of my stuff in a UHAUL, to my new home.
When I got to my new apartment, I was super excited to finally have a place to call my own, and to decorate how I pleased (with nails and furniture instead of 3Ms and sticky tack). As I began to make my new apartment feel like home, I saw influences of my family all over the place. My mom in the organization of the kitchen; my sister in the decoration of my room; my brother in the layout of the furniture to optimize the open space; my father in the books on my bookshelf. Clearly, as a graduate student, I’m not starting out with much: odds and ends from my grandmother’s furniture, chairs and a bed frame from garage sales, an accumulation of stuff from my last four years in undergrad… It’s simple and small, but it has turned into home. It’s nice to come home and call this place mine, to be proud of its cleanliness and of the dinner cooking on the stove, the dishes drying in the dishrack instead of dirty in the sink, and to have a place to invite people in – into my home and into my life.
The first week in Michigan, I didn’t have any obligations to school, so I tried to find my way around the area a little bit, took care of some paperwork, and spent time organizing my apartment. By the end of the week, I was starting to get restless and ready to start school again. I’m used to being busy and working in the lab, and to not have that was starting to eat at me. I went to a new church on Sunday and then started Orientation on Monday.
For all of last week, my fellow classmates and I listened to research talk upon research talk, and I started meeting with some professors to set up rotations for this fall and spring. At the conclusion of the week, I felt less than prepared for graduate school, and the current grad students had succeeded in making me wonder if I was really cut out for this. The weekend passed uneventfully with trying my third church on Sunday.
The official conclusion of Orientation happened on Monday with the first annual “retreat”. Definition of retreat: Panel discussion, Graduate school resources talk, writing with integrity talk, six research talks, and finally a picnic.
On Tuesday, I started officially working in my first lab. I’m working in a diabetic complications lab that contains one post doc, one PhD student, one lab manager and the PI. Small lab, but so far I like it. I’ve spent most of my time doing standard curves, learning assay techniques, and literature searching so far. Today I got to set up my second rotation working in a chemistry lab with cf and cfrd. I’m super excited about the potential for this rotation!
Grad school classes began on Wednesday. My first class is apparently the worst class a graduate student could ever take, combining molecular biology and biochemistry into one semester. Apparently there’s not even enough regular class time, because we have two night classes in addition to MWF class, and our exams are on Thursday nights. The other class I’m taking is on TR and is about the macromolecular methods of analysis in biochemistry. I’m so excited to learn more about NMR, MS, flow cytometry, and so many more awesome techniques. The professor even knew my name when I walked into class this morning (I interviewed with him last spring, but still, he remembered me!).
So far, grad school has been pretty much awesome. There have been some points of frustration and difficulty, but I’ve met some great people and I’m so excited to get to know them more over the course of the next few years. I’m so thankful that God has placed me here, where I can grow and flourish.
It hasn’t all been roses and butterflies. Yesterday was particularly hard, watching the facebook statuses of my friends back at Gordon, going back to what I know is familiar. I miss so many people there so much, and it’s difficult to be so far away from them when all I want to do is just rush across campus to give them a hug and tell them how much they mean to me. But, as I was reminded yesterday, there is a time for everything under the sun. And right now, the time is for me to adjust to this new normal – living on my own, new friends, new labs, new classes, new stage in life. That’s not to say I won’t still miss people at Gordon. I always will, and I will always wish that Massachusetts and Michigan were closer in proximity than just in the alphabet. But, I know that those people are only a phone call, text, email, facebook message, or skype call away. And I’ll be content to wait for God’s timing in seeing them again, no matter how hard that is.
Blessings to all of you, but particularly those of you who are new friends and those of you who are old friends too.
The same God who led you in will lead you out; the same God who was with you then is with you now.