The daily life of a graduate student is an odd one, at least in my experience. The time you spend on yourself and your private life blends totally seamlessly into your work life. It's not like undergrad life where you have 20 hours of class per week, a set amount of readings, deadlines throughout the whole semester, a part-time job AND a social life... all things that each have their own time and place. Being a graduate student is very odd to me because I feel like no matter how "hard" I work during the span of a day, I never feel like I've accomplished anything.
Take yesterday for example:
- - woke up at 8:30am - ate breakfast while checking and responding to my emails
- - 9am - got dressed, finalized grocery list and left the house
- - 9:30am - met up with a professor I T.A. for, picked-up the mid-terms
- - 9:50am - came home, took the 75!!! mid-terms out of my backpacks and went grocery shopping
- - 11am - came back home, unpacked groceries, had a bite to eat and a coffee, did 1 hour of exam correcting
- - 12noon - my husband came home from work for his lunch break... so I made him and myself lunch because that's the wifely thing to do (and I enjoy it... most of the time.)
- - 1 to 5pm - four more hours of correcting...well, it's more like three... I'm sure there was at least an hour in there of answering phone calls and peeing (I drink a lot more when I'm at home!) Oh, and I also had to deal with technical glitches with Stewart's "new" computer... since I'm the computer tech in this house (though I do have great support from my friend Marc.)
- - 5pm - Anticipating my husband's return home, I started making dinner. He didn't arrive until 5:30pm so dinner didn't end until 6:30pm. I juggled the cooking and correcting a few more exams in the process.
- - 6:30pm - back to correcting... another two hours of it in fact! More peeing too.
- - 8:30pm - turned on the television for the first time all day (except for that time I checked the temperature on the weather channel) and listened to the TV while cutting up loads and loads of vegetables for a little dinner gathering I'm having tomorrow... it tooks me almost two hours. In the meantime, I got call from my husband asking me to run a bath for him when he gets home. Now, I know he's been on his feet for 12 hours, but isn't this starting to get a little ridiculous!? I also had the time to rearrange the living room/dinning room area... thinking it would give us more room to entertain.
- - 10:30pm - Stewart came home and helped me put back all the furniture the way it originally was.... I was never particularly good with spatial awareness. He got into the bath that I ran previously while I did the dishes.
- - 11pm - He got out of the bath and asked me if he should drain the water or not... I realised I haven't had a shower so I hop in for 5 minutes.
- - By 11:30pm, I'm lying in bed in my flannel PJs, exhausted but feeling like I had done nothing all day.
Today is pretty much going to be the same day... except substitute "correction" for "collaborators paper writing".
I think what's so difficult about it is that there is no delimitation between ME and WORK. I work from home. I have no immediate deadlines. I have next to no classes to attend. I have no one breathing down my neck. It's all up to me and doing things in my own time... but by April 2006, I should have made damn sure that I read all 25 books on my compulsory reading list and mounted three productions and wrote three major papers and many minor papers and tried to learn something in the process.
Where does the ME time come in you ask? Well, I took a bath last night didn't I?
