We met in 2009. My life was in limbo but exciting things were happening. I had just completed a 6-month internship at a weekly newspaper in Santa Barbara and returned from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico assisting a now quite successful underwater photographer, Thomas Peschack, through an expedition with the International League of Conservation Photographers.
I’ve officially completed the first quarter of my PhD, and I felt like it was one of my weaker academic performances to date. Much like my first semester in the MEM program at the Nicholas School, I felt ALL the feelings: inadequate, gleeful, inept, intellectually engaged, inefficient, excited, frustrated, enlightened, moronic, self-assured, and doubt-ridden…to name a few.
This summer I was reminded of two things:
I HATE moving
The ocean is awesome
Let’s tackle the annoying one first. Summer 2015 goes down in the books.
In three months I will transform from a Blue Devil to a Cardinal as I begin my PhD at the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University (E-IPER). It took three rounds of applying to PhD programs over a span of 7 years to finally be accepted.
A few weeks before graduation I was honored (and surprised!) to be selected as the student speaker for our graduation ceremony. The nomination forced me to hunker down and write about my time at the Nicholas School. Initially this seemed like just another item to check off the long end-of-the-school-year task list, but it ended up being an incredible gift. It forced me to carve out time to reflect on all of my experiences and especially the extraordinary people I’d come to know during our two years in the Master of Environmental Management Program.
Grad school has been a freight train. Fall break flew by, and we’re registering for spring courses. Which is why I have yet to write about the ScienceOnline conference I attended at the University of MiamiContinue reading
