And We're Off... to Study!

We are now two weeks into our busy schedules, so we apologize for the lack of posts.  So here is a peak at what the life of a grad student is like...

Dan finally settled on a research advisor.  He will be looking at galaxy clusters, which is very similar to the research he did as an undergrad.  He is taking 3 classes which meet Monday-Thursday, so he actually has a day to get stuff finished on Friday!  The biggest annoyance so far has to be the number of colloquium/talks/tea time/meetings that the astronomy grad students are expected to attend.  It really makes being productive hard!  Dan likes his 10th floor office window that allows him to see approaching storms and not feel like a total workaholic.  As crazy as our lives have become, we are constantly reminded by profs/older grad students that this is the easy part of grad school.  Yikes!!!  Maybe these posts will become even less frequent!

Gail was definitely not expecting grad school to be this hard right away!  She's taking 2 classes that meet Monday-Wednesday-Friday and one small discussion class that meets periodically throughout the quarter.  The biggest chunk of her time is spent in lab working with mice!  She's really enjoying it and is finally starting to be able to do some lab work after reading papers for 2 weeks.  Like Dan, there are seminars and talks everyday that take up a lot of time!  The great thing about Michigan is the diversity of research going on, and, being 1st years, we're invited to all of them!  Also, we learned that you never go hungry in grad school.  They feed you everywhere you go!  Which is good, seeing as how we have decided to stop cooking during the week because of all the work we have to get done.  It looks like we will be surviving on Trader Joe's frozen meals for the next couple of semesters!

We went to our second home football game today!  Big Blue's offense was rocking as usual, but their defense could have made the game less exciting.  We still had a great time in the student section and now have the fight song permanently stuck in our heads.  Tomorrow we are going to the Astronomy Department picnic.  While we are really busy with work, we still try to take a couple hours out of the weekend for some fun.

Look for our next post titled "Get Me Out of Here!"

Go Blue!