About 6 blocks from my apartment, I can catch the bus - there are three different bus routes I can take from there to within a block of the business school and during most of the day they run every 5 minutes or so. This morning, I got to the bus stop, waited under 90 seconds, got on the bus. The elapsed time from the bus stop to my entering my office: under 8 minutes.
This afternoon I figured out how to catch the bus from school - I have to make a sort of downward spiral around some buildings and down a ramp to the road (the campus is basically astride this major east-west road). I waited for less than a minute and got on the bus. The place where I get off the bus is even closer to my apartment - about 2.5 blocks.
So far, I'm loving the bus thing. Of course, once the winter weather hits, I might want to take a different bus that picks up and drops off about one block from my apartment, but it runs much less frequently, so I'll have to actually consider the timing of it. (Right now, with 3 super-frequent buses to choose from, I pretty much can get on a bus immediately from that other bus stop so at any normal time of day, thinking about timing is utterly unnecessary.)
No classes today. I sat in on the undergrad CB class again and met with the second prof I am RAing for (who also teaches that undergrad class) to talk about research ideas. Let's call her B. As opposed to the other prof (let's call her K.) who is putting me to work on an idea she's been interested in for a while, B. is encouraging me to come up with my own project (with her input, of course). I have several very general ideas for things that would fit with the work she does and one in particular that I want to consider first. There is an extensive lit review in my near future as I try to figure out what the state of the science is, so to speak, in this area.
Tomorrow, I have nothing taking me to school, so I am looking forward to spending the day churning through as many as possible of the very many articles I need to read for next week's classes.
My officemate is a quant, so her life is about pushing her way through problem sets in econ (which is basically math and is especially grueling at a top-10 econ program like ours). As a CB person, my life is like those in the "soft" social sciences and humanities - astonishingly long reading lists. So even though we're both in marketing, our work is very, very different. (We will both be taking the core seminars in marketing, of course, which will sometimes play to her strengths and sometimes to mine. This semester, it's mine.) It might seem like reading some articles is a lot easier than doing a bunch of proofy math problems (and the gods know I prefer it) but in grad school, professors often assign a nearly impossible amount of reading, and the reading is generally not easy because of the content or the poor writing or both (and the readings are especially grueling at a top-5 psychology program like ours). And because my classes are at least nominally seminars, we have to show up ready to discuss the papers (and we have to submit response papers in advance every week).
So, basically I guess I'm saying that grad school is tough all around. That being said, it's also awesome.
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I think it might seem initially as though reading papers, and even responding to them, is easier than writing proofs, because when you imagine being assigned a proof, it's easy to imagine not being able to do it at all, while anyone (literate) can take a stab at reading and responding. But the idea of doing that kind of work you do in your program (reading and synthesizing so much info, doing lit reviews) gives me serious heebies. I am totally unwilling to do things like that, especially in quantity.
I think writing proofs is less pass/fail than people would imagine (you can often take a good stab even if you don't succeed), while reading/responding is more so (you can do a comletely suck job and most of us would).
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