School Me Saturday 12/10/22- December report

This is the December wrap-up report of my personal school journey.

I’ve been a PhD student for four whole months now. I’ve learned so much.

I had to learn an entirely new program for calculating statistics. Hell, I had to learn an entire new school.

This is the biggest school that I’ve been to, including Creighton.

But the short of it is I passed all three of my courses.

Phew.

Statistics bedeviled me of course.

I am decidedly not math brained. And so it makes me all thumbs when I am writing up my homework. When I was solving and writing up the final test for the class, I completed 4 of the 6 questions. I decided to save my progress, go to bed, and hit the last two problems in the morning. That way I could submit the final before 1200, well before the cutoff time of 2000. I saved my progress and went to be at roughly 0100. I got up, intending to finish the last two questions and submit the test before noon.

And the file was GONE!

Poof.

As if it never existed.

The output worksheet remained as that had been saved separately.

But the homework write-up itself?

Gone.

And IT doesn’t work on the weekends.

But the worksheet was still saved.

No time to go down the rabbit hole of what happened. I opened another copy of the assignment, saved it again, and rewrote the damn thing, using the output that was saved separately.

Not the best Sunday of my life.

But, you know what?

I passed.

I survived to take the second half of the statistics course in the spring.

I developed some coping strategies over the course of this semester.

Make a clear calendar of what is due and when.

Make time for writing group.

Make time early in the week for required reading, ideally not the day before I am going to be expected to interact with class.

Most importantly, keep reminding myself that this is not a sprint. This is a marathon. And each class builds onto the next to utilize my time the best.

Second most important is to take time to relax and let my brain contemplate the classes. This helps immensely when writing papers.

But first semester is finished.

And next semester I have the second half of statistics, nursing informatics, and nursing theory. One math class and 2 paper classes.

But for now, I am going to take my own advice and relax.

After all, the start of Spring semester is five weeks away.

Plenty of time to think about my dissertation topic.