Orientation Week.
Affectionately and unofficially known as the best week of your undergraduate experience, “O-Week” is typically synonymous with summer camp for frosh. Well grad students, I have news for you. Graduate school orientation is less faculty-team-building, and more pub nights with the few others in your program. Now, as someone who does not drink beer this tends to be a tad awkward since it becomes more obvious and is a general topic of conversation revisited when everyone orders another round of drinks except you. Anyways.
Walking around campus to the constant cheering and never-ending energy remains an exciting way to relive the O-Week experience without actually reliving it. At the same time, it also makes you feel old, despite my direct transition from undergrad to graduate school making me only one year older than the average oldest undergraduate student. And, as you might expect, with feeling old in a new city comes the old-people activities. Like laundry. And ironing. And cooking… Things that you might have learned as an 18 year old student living in residence, or as a 19 year old student living off-campus. Nevertheless, here I am in my twenties and sending snapchats of myself ironing to my friends to validate the fact that I now have my big-girl pants on.
And while my inventive set-up of a kitchen counter with a bed sheet tucked into the cupboard a-la-makeshift-ironing-board is all kinds of luxurious laundry tools, I can’t even take credit for the idea (thanks Mom!). However, I started to realize today, there were so many ways I could approach this Orientation Week:
- Ambitiously, I wrote down all the general graduate student activities into my planner, alongside the program-specific activities, including the times and locations. I could go to all of these activities, which would result in 5 hours of sleep per night and a burnt-out Felicia by Sunday night.
- I could ignore all of the activities, sit in my apartment, and watch Friends like it’s still the summer it feels like outside (cue 30 degree weather. Celsius, incase anyone thought that was sarcasm).
- Sweat on my bike and rush to roughly 50% of the activities – rushing, since I still have not completely mastered time management while biking, and biking, since walking is overrated. Spend the remaining 50% of my time learning how to hand-signal at stop signs and traffic lights properly so as to avoid as much tippage as possible while on a moving bicycle with a full backpack.
- Repeat Option #3, but also use the remaining 50% to complete big-girl activities. Cue: Mom’s voice telling me to iron that one shirt with wrinkles that I know I’ll wear soon.
Clearly, based on my anecdote about make-shift ironing boards I chose #4, but you must know that I fully considered all four of those options. Dear Reader, I washed my floors, too. Housekeeping is a skill I fully enjoy at the moment, because I can fully, one hundred percent justify that it is important to establish good housekeeping habits before getting into the depths of an MA. Right? Maybe. But hey, feeling like a big girl, singing that Pull-Ups song, “Mommy, wow! I’m a big kid now!” while dancing with the wet-wipe Swiffer is a productive use of my time. Those five readings for the first class next week can wait. Besides, when it comes time to do them, I’ll already have my big-girl pants on. (I hope.)
The Queenstown Chronicles 