My natural early-morning activity: archery or hiking... or sleeping, depending on what I did the night before. Sitting through an orientation session with almost 1200 other graduate students while listening to a lot of talk about how great the football and basketball teams are.
Oh and another shocker for me -- many of the students I ran into didn't even have a research component to their program and were in some pretty strange fields like business and journalism. The closest thing to comfort for me was a small group of somewhat disoriented Chinese math and physics PhD students who were looking for "comforting" person. I probably provided about 30 seconds of reassurance when they saw my Caltech hat during the mandatory "say hi to your neighbors, tell your major, undergrad institution, and a hobby or two" bit, but I think I scared pretty badly when I indicated that I'm an ecologist with a focus in forestry and that I really fond of traditional archery and that I'm a member of Traditional Bowhunters of Florida. There's nothing scary about being someone who wants to bow-hunt species that are overpopulating the region because humans idiotically removed all the natural predators, is there?
After the mandatory sit-on-my-butt-for-too-long orientation, I had to deal with paperwork and clearing holds on enrollment. Not exactly fun, but I have to do it to start the real adventure (the PhD, not the bow-hunting) and I didn't really get to interact much more with my fellow graduate students. I'm guessing that I'll be much once I go to orientations in forestry and the School of Natural Resources and Environment when I can actually meet people who are at least semi- in my field.
I'm really itching for a bit of shooting actually, but not having anything really good to shoot at indoors, I think I'm just going to drool at some more classes to take the next few semesters.
No comments:
Post a Comment