and it begins

I am finally starting to feel - at least a little bit - like I'm in grad school. I'm not sure if it was the 8 hours of online TA/IRB training or actually piecing together a semblance of a class schedule, but I'm starting to feel legit.

Let the madness begin!

My cohort (all 7 of us! big class!) went out to the Flying Saucer yesterday for a little pint-night get together. It was nice meeting everyone - a very fun, young, dynamic group. We're all interested in different things, which is wonderful. I think we're going tubing on Sunday, too...

I received my TA assignment for the fall, and it looks like I'm assisting two different professors with Developmental Psychology. One of the professors (my mentor)focuses on developmental issues (FX, autism, etc.), but it looks like the other professor is interested in aging. I guess I'll learn a lot about... a lot. I'll also probably be buried in paperwork - I'm only assigned to two sections, but each section has 70 students -- YIKES! We're not in TR anymore...

I'm starting to feel extra grateful for that move to Nashville last summer. I got to practice the whole "find an apartment, meet new people, live off of nothing, go with the flow" lifestyle... and I got pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. Even my IRB training was cut in half because of the Vanderbilt red tape. AND I'm dusting off some old "last summer" recipes that helped me cook on a tight budget. It's so fun!!

Tonight, I made my absolute favorite healthy summer stretch-a-buck meal: curry chicken salad. It's DELISH... a palm of raisins, 20ish green grapes, a pound of sauteed chicken, palm of diced onions, a diced golden delicious apple, a little bit of light dukes, a stalk of diced celery, garlic salt, pepper, and yellow curry powder. Pecans are awesome in it, but they can be pricey (unless your fiance can hack-saw them out of a tree for you.. in which case, hooray!). You can also stuff it in a green pepper and bake it in the oven.. or eat it on a piece of whole wheat toast.. mm.. The stuff lasts for three meals, and it probably costs about $9 to make (when chicken is on sale). Granted, that's if you have ingredients on hand (and I unfortunately did not)... but those frustrating stock-the-pantry grocery runs are inevitable. Now I have all sorts of random veggies and fruits to add to other things :)

Also on my yummy cheap food list? The return of instant pudding. Fifty cents of fat-free, sugar-free, freeze-it-like-a-popsicle bliss. Tonight I added bananas and graham crackers, tomorrow I have big plans for dark chocolate hershey kisses. Seriously, it's perfection.

The only culinary credit I can give to camp (other than the grilled-versus-slathered philly... a la K Cox) is sugar free drinks... so I've now been converted to store-brand sugar free crystal light. Pink lemonade in particular. I make a big slightly-too-strong pitcher of it, then dilute each glass with water, a splash of club soda (I can't kick the fizzy-habit all together... I'm trying, people), and a little bit of lime juice. It's soooo good, and it's a good fraction of the price of soda. AND less caffeine! We all win.

Clearly I'm a little (too) excited about cooking again. Amazing what 9 weeks of camp food will do...

Anyways. Tomorrow is the first big grad student workshop. I'm not super excited -- it's going to be a lot of policies, fees, etc... but it will be nice to meet some more people and actually get a feel for how the next five years of my life are going to run. I figured out a few of my classes by poking around online -- I'm taking a stats course, an introduction to school psychology class, and a basic assessment course... plus some sort of elective and hopefully a class on teaching (so I can teach ASAP).

Classes = books = homework. Am I truly diving into this again? Oof..

I really am ready, though. Everyone says the first year is the hardest, so I figure coming fresh out of a few Brewer and stat classes will keep the momentum up. 4 classes, 2 sections of TA-ing, and research on the side. How hard could it be?

Oof.

:) Just another adventure...