Two More Weeks!

This afternoon I was walking from the parking garage to my office and it was a beautiful, sunny day and I was already in a good mood because it is FINALLY warm enough for short sleeves and I'd finished this evening's paper with two hours to spare and I don't actually think it was a horrible (for once!), so I was sort of bobbing down the sidewalk still mentally singing the horribly misogynistic yet oh-so-catchy rap song I had been listening to my car and I inhaled and caught the smell of cut grass and sprinklers and suddenly it really hit me that it's going to be summer vacation two weeks from tomorrow. I could not possibly be happier about that!

With that said, do you know how freakin' insane it feels that my first year as a PhD student is already over?! In a way this is exciting: one year down, only a billion more to go! Yet it's also a little scary because the faster the time goes by, the closer I get to having to make decisions about my dissertation and then I actually have to research and write said dissertation and then try to find a job...if the first year went by this fast, I can only imagine how quickly time is going to continue to fly. And speaking of the first year being over, tomorrow is my end-of-year review. Basically, it means I have to go sit in the conference room with all of the faculty and they get fifteen minutes to tell me exactly how my progress has been all year. In other words, it is one of my worst nightmares being played out in real life. Ugh, the pressure!! Truthfully, I have no reason to believe that they're going to say anything particularly bad about me. Despite the occasional worry that I'm going to fail at this whole endeavor, I actually think I have a pretty realistic grasp of my strengths and weaknesses as a PhD student and I can say with confidence that my strengths outweigh my weaknesses. I'm pretty sure I know exactly what they're going to tell me to work on tomorrow, but I'm also pretty sure I'm mostly going to get a positive review. Of course, my fear is that because I'm not too nervous about the whole thing, I'm going to get totally blindsided by some comment and end up in tears. Frankly, I might be in tears before I even get into the meeting anyway because I think I'm going to be fragile after not sleeping much tonight and I just hate, hate, hate being in situations where it feels like people are sitting around judging me. (Um, I guess NOBODY really likes that sort of situation, do they?)

Why am I going to be up all night? Because I have a TON of grading to do. Tomorrow is the last day I see my students in discussion so I need to get all of their papers back to them so they know their grade going into their final. I should have graded several of these papers a couple of weeks ago and I let things pile up, so it's totally my own fault and I can't really complain. But I'm complaining anyway.

But it's okay! Because it's almost summer!