The (Foreseeable) Future of A Caffeinated GC | Month 1 Update

Hello! It's been a while since I've posted on this blog, and for good reason. Grad school is in full swing and the adjustment period took much longer than I had originally anticipated. I've got a full week of classes, and am enjoying every single one of them. It's kind of a unique feeling to actually like all of the classes you're taking, and it's even stranger to realize that everything you're learning in all of your classes directly applies to what you want to do with your life!

As you might expect, my blog will have to take a backseat for the next couple of years because school is obviously a priority. However, I do want to continue to update you guys about how school is going, new challenges, study tips, accomplishments, and my ever-changing self-care strategies. So, I will do my best to try to post once a month (ha ha). Hopefully this is something of interest to you, because realistically this is all I can offer for now. So, let's just jump right in!

~ Month 1 ~

The transition back to school was challenging. I felt like it had been so long since I was in classes that I basically had to re-learn how to study and manage my time. What felt different this time around was that I had taken those two years off from school, and in that time I was able to work on my mental health and was in a really good space prior to entering school. And now that I'm in school again, taking care of my mental health is more of a priority now than it was in undergrad. So, part of that transition was finding a balance between school and fun. One of the little things I do to maintain that balance is to have dinner with my best friend. Just the act of stepping away from the books and sitting with a friend to share a meal is a nice break from studying all the time. I have classes everyday of the week and I'm thinking about school for the majority of my day, so carving out that one hour of my day to catch up with my best friend and just watch TV is important to me.

Another new thing I'm doing is a meal delivery service. Because I commute to school, I don't have the luxury of coming home to cook or make meals, but I wanted to make sure that eating (something I rare did in undergrad) was something I didn't give up because I was lazy or too busy with studying. I'm also not the biggest fan of meal prepping, just because I do spend most of my weekend...studying. So, I looked into the meal delivery services that will send you pre-cooked meals and all you have to do is microwave them! I've been doing this for a couple of weeks now and I really like it! It's convenient and I have such a wide variety of meal choices, and what I like most of all is that the meals that are prepared for me are definitely healthier than anything I would cook for myself. And because a lot of those services get cheaper per meal the larger the package you get, my best friend and I split one of the larger packages so each meal ends up being around $8 (which saves me money on all the take out I used to order). 

I'm not sure if you want to hear about school, and I'm not even sure if i want to talk about school, but basically: grad school is hard. KGI's program is structured in a way that has students take the majority of their coursework in the first year, and the second year is spent primarily in clinical rotations. So, my first two semesters are very rigorous. Everyone I've spoken to about my course work has validated what I've been feeling, I am learning a lot of information. But, on the bright side, I do get excited about all the things I am learning, which does take the sting away from the sheer amount of reading and studying I do every week. I do want to say that all of my mentors (new and old) have been extremely supportive, and the program leadership is really involved and is really invested in our success, and that is incredibly reassuring. I also have some of the best classmates, who let me study in their apartments, use their microwaves, offer me their couches for sleepovers. There is something really special about having a group of amazing women going on this journey with me, it feels like a weird little science sorority. 

Most Challenging Class: Human Molecular Genetics

Most Interesting Class: Human Molecular Genetics

Most Excited For: Planning my thesis

Dreading: Human Molecular Genetics exam...

Favorite Topic Right Now: Birth defects and learning to read ultrasounds