Oklahoma City – a thousand new paths

Wow! I can’t believe that I’ve been engaged for a month already…and that it’s been almost that long since my last blog post. Needless to say, this has been one amazing, crazy, busy month.

Graduate school completely overwhelmed me from about two weeks ago through last Wednesday. I have no idea why I get so stressed, especially since I’m doing well in my classes. I have to constantly remind myself that things are going well, and there’s no need to stress. Then when I wasn’t feeling overwhelmed with grad school, I was feeling homesick. I just wanted to be back in Georgia for Mercer’s homecoming and family Thanksgiving/Christmas decorating. But it’s all good since Cason kept reminding me that we will be home oh so soon for Christmas break and lots of wedding planning.

Overall, though, things are great. Here are some of the highlights from November:

I got engaged, which you already knew!

My cohort hosted an engagement party for Cason and I, which you may not have known.

I went to a Mercer basketball game in Austin, which was amazing even though my guys didn’t take home a win that night. I met a Mercer ADPi alum, and it was really neat to connect over that!

I became the Membership Education Advisor for the Zeta Chi chapter of ADPi here at Baylor. I got to meet the new officers on the Membership Education team as well as the other advisors. I’m super excited to be involved with Alpha Delta Pi as an alum/Pi member!

Cason and I went to see John Mayer in Oklahoma City, which was amazing beyond words! Phillip Phillips opened for John, and he was also awesome. Even though John didn’t play “Why Georgia,” he played “Gravity,” “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room,” “No Such Thing,” and several songs from his newer albums. I love how he mixes a lot of the older stuff in with his new music. I much prefer that over going to a concert and basically listening to the artist’s newest album. Funny story: John started to play a cover of a song, and this guy sitting next to Cason started yelling, “That’s gravity! That’s gravity!” Then John Mayer looked right over at the guy and was like, “No dude, it’s not gravity,” and basically told the guy that it was a good try though. It was interesting though because John Mayer also told the guy that he (John) would have totally done something like that in a concert–like yell out during a quiet song, I guess. It’s just really cool to see an artist roll with the punches and interact with the audience. At one point a group of people counted to three together and yelled, “We love you, John,” and he made a comment about how he’d never seen a group count to three before. He said he always hears, “We love you,” but he thought it was cool to actually see the group of people counting before they yelled together. When I saw John in Atlanta years ago, he also took time to read practically every poster within sight and responded to each one in the middle of the concert. I know everyone has their fair share of reasons to dislike John Mayer, but he puts on a heck of a concert and really interacts with the audience. It was just generally an all-around fantastic weekend. (Oh, did I mention we were on the third row? Win.)

Not much else is going on besides preparing for finals, getting ready to go home, and wedding planning, but I’ll hopefully have more updates soon!

Downtown Oklahoma City–adorable. Last weekend Cason and I visited some friends from home, who are now stationed in OK City. They were the perfect hosts. They took us to dinner downtown at this place called Texadelphia. Cute little combo of Mexican and Philly cheese steaks. Delicious. Then we played Scattergories together and watched a hilarious Jim Carey movie. I love traveling, and I really like that living in Texas now gives us opportunities to travel to new places without having to drive really far distances.

I had my first statistics exam on Monday, and I did well. I’m thankful that I have this class my first semester in grad school because it is the one class where I’ve learned everything before. Intro to School Psychology is good so far because it has mostly been topics about School Psychology that I researched when looking at different school psych programs. Though my Psychology of Exceptional Children class is pretty new to me, a lot of it seems to be common sense so far. There are loads of acronyms that I’ve never seen before, but I’ve learned them pretty quickly. The biggest aspect of that class so far is that I will serve for 10 hours this semester outside of the classroom. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to tutor a 13-year old boy with Aspergers. I’m really eager to get started, and I’m glad that I will be tutoring him in my favorite subject–math.

Assessment is a completely new class; I never had the opportunity to learn how to administer cognitive abilities assessments. Why would I have needed to? Even though the class is new and sometimes difficult, the subject is interesting and necessary. In order to do my job as a school psychologist well, I have to learn how to administer these assessments. Today I will be administering my first assessment to another classmate. After sitting in class for two weeks “learning” how to administer this assessment, I’m just ready to get the show on the road and actually do it! It’s one thing to listen to someone tell you how to do it, but I have a feeling we will learn more today by administering the test than we have learned in the past two weeks. Experience seems to be the primary teacher in this field thus far.

The theme for the next several years will likely continue to be, “Let’s throw them to the wolves and see how they do.” The perfectionist in me doesn’t always like this idea. I am a planner, and I like to have expectations clearly defined before I embark on a large task. School psychology doesn’t work that way at all. The only way to learn is to attempt, fail, and try again. I like to watch others attempt and fail so that I can learn from that instead of making my own mistakes. Well, that’s not an option here, so I’m still trying to get used to that. Luckily, our first attempts and failures with administering this assessment are pretty low-risk. So we make several mistakes in front of our peers–they’re likely to make similar mistakes. Plus, I understand that they’d rather have us make the big mistakes with our peers and our professors instead of in the school setting.

On another note, I get to fly home next weekend for my cousin’s wedding, and I am SO excited! One, I love flying. Two, I love weddings. Three, I love Georgia. Four, I love my family. (That was in increasing order, if you didn’t notice.) Needless to say, this is going to be a pretty awesome weekend. Now I just have to get through five classes, several homework assignments, two quizzes, and one extra test administration & protocol. Not too bad, right? Honestly, it could be much worse. I’m just thankful for three-day weekends and fun events to look forward to!

Tag: Oklahoma City

an exciting engagement month

if at first you don’t succeed…