The main topics of conversation for me this week have been graduate school and honors theses, especially since many of my friends are also juniors. I'm not usually prone to getting freaked out about the future, but it's getting way too real for comfort; this week my boyfriend and I sat down and started mapping out which grad school's we'd both want to go to, and my research mentor has started referring to other researchers as my future PhD advisors! I feel like I'm so far behind too - many people have already taken or started preparing for the GRE, and they all seem to have such solid ideas of what fields they want to study and what schools they want to go to. I'm still doing my characteristic wavering - at least every couple months or so I feel like I have no idea where I'm going to various degrees. I'm increasingly sure that I do indeed want to go into neuroscience, which has been my plan all along, but it's a pretty big field and I just don't feel like I have enough knowledge in it to know what I'm interested in, which in turn makes it pretty hard to decide what grad schools would be a good fit. Plus, I just don't feel ready to go to grad school at all. Maybe I will in a year and some when I actually get there, but I feel like I want to go in with all guns blazing, not just sort of get by.
Very recently (as in, while my mind was wandering during class a couple days ago) I've started toying with the idea of taking the fall semester to return to the lab where I worked at Johns Hopkins and do my honors thesis work there, and in the process tagging an extra semester to my undergrad time and postponing grad school one year. In the past when I've considered taking a gap year I always thought of doing it the other way around - finish school, then take time to go do research somewhere. But I find this way much more appealing. For one thing, I won't feel as much like I'm just bumming around while all my friends are off at grad school, because I'll still be taking classes. And I won't just be adding an extra semester to make my courseload per semester lighter, but instead actually using some time in a productive way. And... I'm just really not good at doing things in traditional ways, so the idea of skipping out and going to work for a while instead of taking classes straight through is extremely appealing. There would be a lot to coordinate, but it might be exactly what I need... definitely food for thought.
- Celine
No comments:
Post a Comment