Day 2

 I have Jamin to thank for the name of this blog, since he's the first person I ever heard pronounce PhD "phud" (think Elmer Fudd). My life feels a bit like a traveling carnival - I never know when something will go horribly wrong, but fairly certain it will happen at some point. While I was imagining one of these freak accident type scenarios, I thought of calling this new chapter in my life "Adventures in Funland". Then I remembered when I was a new master's student and Jamin asked me if I planned to get a "phud". And I guess the rest is history. So here begin my "Adventures in PhuDland".

I had intended to start writing on my first day of classes as a new PhD student. That clearly did not happen (hence the title of this post), but I'm always a day late and a dollar short with everything, so no big surprise there.

Day 1 Recap:
I wanted to give myself enough time to drive to campus, park, and make it to my class without feeling unnecessarily rushed, so I left the house at 8:45. It takes about 30 minutes to get to Scott Hall and my first class doesn't start until 9:30. I think I ended up walking into the classroom at about 9:25-ish. That was cutting it just a bit close. Especially since the clock in the room was stuck on 8:10, so the professor was kind of guessing what time it was.

Aside from that excitement, my first day was kind of, well, lame. So, the way classes work is all the 1st year PhD students in the med school (from various departments like cancer biology, physiology, etc.) have to take the same basic biomedical science classes. For fall, the two courses are Cell Biology and Molecular Biology (which is really more like a biochem. course). They are back to back and each class is an hour long. Oh, and they meet five days a week. Blech. All the programs admitted more than one student...except for Immuno/Micro. Yeah, I'm a class of one. So all these other students are clustered in their little groups chatting and getting to know one another. And then there's me. I just wanted to fast forward to 11:45 so I could get the hell out of there. And that's exactly what happened. The one bright spot was that I got to meet most of the current students in my department at their annual graduate committee meeting. I really like them. They're all really friendly AND they all seem to have that dry sarcastic sense of humor that I so love about the Biology department at Eastern. An additional bonus is that there is another new student - but he's a master's student. YES!!! That means that I am officially NOT the low man on the totem pole!

After that meeting, I went home. I think I was home by 1:30 and then I watched some People's Court (love that show!), surfed the web, and just generally procrastinated for the rest of the day. I didn't get jack shit done in terms of homework or really anything else.

Day 2
Okay, fast forward to today. Today I left the house at 8:30 to give myself more of a buffer. Traffic was awful - dozens upon dozens of semi trucks that took up both the right and middle lanes of I-94. Only the left lane had traffic that was moving over 65 mph. Barely. But it didn't take me any longer to get there, plus now I had 20 minutes to kill so I decided to get a little crazy and park in the structure across from Scott Hall. I hate parking structures. And I ended up on the 7th fucking floor. I didn't even think that I'd gone in that many circles up the ramp, but I guess I had. And I ended up in the tiny elevator with my molecular biology professor and his wife and a couple of other people. I just love those awkward moments being crammed in an elevator with people I mostly don't know. So I make it to the classroom at 9:15 only to find another class still in session and most of my classmates (still clustered together!) waiting outside. Ultimately, I made it through the two hours of class, promptly turned tail and drove home. Lab rotations and journal club don't start until October, so until then I really don't have much of a reason to hang around campus. I'll start exploring Detroit soon - there are some really cool restaurants and shops in Midtown within walking distance of the med school - but I just want to make it through the end of this week before I plan my next big adventure.