First Day

Today was the first day of classes in my PhD program.

I walked to school this morning in the very pleasant weather (sunny and temp in the 50's) - I was about 20 minutes early (class starts at 9) and easily found the room.  But nobody else showed up.  About 5 minutes before 9, a fellow marketing student (a 2nd year) came by and I found out that the professor emailed us that the room had been changed.  And when we went to the new room, we found out from a psych student that the email also said that on this first day, we were meeting at 10 instead of 9.

I went outside, sat at a table, and started reading an article for another class and was soon joined by a guy in my marketing cohort.  We chatted about the fact that the stats courses at the university are basically all using R as the statistical package instead of SPSS, SAS, Stata, etc.  (The aforementioned 2nd year student told me later that this switch in the educational psychology stats courses is extremely recent; her course used SPSS.)

So anyway, the class (research methods) sounds like it will be interesting but a lot of work - there is a significant amount of reading of sometimes very difficult articles.  (This course neither teaches stats nor provides information about various experimental design options, but is more of an overview of current controversies in the field.)

This afternoon, I also sat in on the first lecture of the class I'm going to be TAing for next year.  I finished up printing some things in my office and decided to try taking the bus home, but I wasn't able to easily find the bus stop, so I walked instead.  (I've now looked at it on google maps and think I understand where it is; I'll try again tomorrow or Thursday.)  Rather than take the scenic route I used this morning, I walked down a major street through downtown for a change.  It's about 5.5 miles round trip, and it was pretty easy (though my shoulders do feel a little tight after carrying the backpack so long and I rubbed a spot on my left foot so it's a bit sore).

Now I'm home so I can start doing some actual work.