I have a future...

My first quarter of graduate school is officially over. And what a rainy, gloomy day it is. I seem to have survived though, more than survived, really. I turned in my icky paper today. I'm content with it. It was 7.5 single spaced pages though! yikes. And had 21 figures. It was way thick... Two staples barely hold it. Hopefully the prof will like it =). He's Czech, so I listened to Dvorak, a Czech composer, during part of the time I was working on it, so that it would hopefully inspire me to think in ways my Czech professor would like me to... Mostly I was just motivated to play solitaire though... That's no good =).

Yesterday I had my guidance committee meeting. It went well, though the entire concept scares me. You meet with three professors, and decided specifically which classes you'll take for which requirements. And if you're a PhD student, you have to determine what three of the topics for your oral qualifying exams will be, and pick two classes to take for each of those. Yikes yikes yikes. So yeah, my future, or at least the next two years of it, is pretty much set.

Wanna know what I'll be tested on (and what I'd better know damn well) in two years? Here are the topics we decided on:
1. Population Ecology
2. Invasion Biology
3. Plant Ecophysiology
and of course, Statistics will be a fourth topic. Ick ick ick.

So this morning I sat down and worked out an academic schedule for myself for the next two years. Freaky. I never did that as an undergrad. Never! And it's a good thing too, it would've been too depressing if I had. I kept having to postpone taking classes because they'd all be scheduled at the exact same time... And half of the classes that I ended up taking, I had no idea I would take until probably a week or two before the quarter started. Or even after the quarter started, in some cases... But Stanford was much more lax...

Now it's Christmas break. yay. A break. What're my plans? Well, in a week I have to go back home (if you'll be around, give me a call. As far as I know my mom hasn't changed the phone number =)...). Other than that, I intend to read a lot, and learn how to knit. Whee.