Finally finished!

As of 5 minutes ago, I am finished with my first year of graduate school! I have turned in all assignments, taken all the exams and finished grading my students’ exams. It feels so wonderful to finally be free! David still has one more exam to take today at 1, but by this evening we will both be enjoying summer “break”.

Here are our summer plans:

After taking a much-deserved break Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I will start studying for these big exams called Prelims that I have to take June 2nd and 3rd. I plan on studying 6 hours a day Mon-Fri and trying my best to pass both (although it is very rare for people to pass 2 at one time..) After June 3rd I have a real break, with NOTHING to do until June 15th when I start my summer research. I might go to Florida to visit a friend during this break, or maybe I will just find someone’s pool to lay at for 10 days straight :) Either way I will definitely take it easy. From June 15th-August 6th (minus a couple days when David and I go to Charleston with his family!) I will be working 8:30-5 Mon-Fri doing some real math research! People keep asking me what kind of research you can do in math. To be honest, I don’t know yet. But I am hoping to find out this summer. Sometime after August 6th David and I will be going on another family vacation with my family to Florida for a week. Can’t wait!

David is keeping his job that he has had this semester at the Fine Arts Library. He gets paid a good amount and they can give him 40 hours a week. So he will work there full time, and then hopefully starting in June he will go shadow some lawyers at some estate planning firms for a few hours each week. This will give him an opportunity to meet some lawyers in Lexington and get an idea of what estate planning will be like, but he can also help to financially support us.

Even though we don’t necessary have 4 wide open months of summer in front of us we are excited for the amount of time we will have together. School is one of those occupations which really easily takes over your whole life… your evenings and weekends. But with our jobs this summer we will be done by 5! And we will have every weekend open to us to relax, go to the Farmer’s Market, go hiking in the Gorge, take our pup to the park… all kinds of things. We are really excited for this time!

As hard as school is sometimes I wonder how I will ever survive without some kind of “summer break”. For me, this is such a glorious time because if nothing else it breaks the monotony. I kind of get bored easily, and a part of me really likes change so that is one huge plus to being in school. Things are definitely always changing.

Well, as if you can’t tell, I am very excited to be free of the stress and responsibility of school for a few months. Hopefully my blog posts will begin to be more exciting as I am planning on trying new things this summer.. new recipes, maybe some crafts, things like that. Either way I hope that you stay in touch!