The fall semester is finally over! YAY! It feels so good to finish another semester of school, which naturally means I’m getting closer to finishing my graduate degree! Although it makes me super excited, I’m also really nervous about what’s ahead, career-wise. Don’t get me wrong, I love that I’m getting closer to graduating but, this week someone asked what I was planning to do after, and I was kind of shocked that I kind of know what I want to do but, I kind of don’t. Anyone else? ??♀️ Like, it’s kind of scary when you know you want to grow in your career and you kind of know where you want to go, but you’re afraid of change. I guess, the only way to move is forward. Am I right?
Anyways, I wanted to write this blog to reflect on this past semester and what I learned and how I felt.
This past semester I took two courses. The first was an online class in Instructional Communication and the second was a class about Qualitative Research methods. Let me start off by saying that I really enjoyed both classes and I learned a lot about both subjects. The Instructional Communication class made me really think about my future as a potential community college instructor and I really liked that. Teaching has always been something I’ve gravitated towards, so that’s definitely a possibility at some point in my career. The other class was about conducting research, which I find really interesting, especially as it relates to the world of academia.
Of the many things I learned this past semester, I feel that the most important one that I really saw come to life was that of collaboration with your peers. I feel that I’ve often heard about this multiple times throughout my educational career and I sort of brushed it off my shoulder, knowing it was true but never really experiencing it myself but, let me tell you. This semester I feel like I got close to a few of my classmates and wow! This made life so much easier. I felt supported, and accompanied, even though it was in a virtual way. There just aren’t words to describe how good it felt to feel that we were all going through it together. That is definitely one of the main differences I notice between undergrad and grad school.
As for the near future, as some of you may know (if you read my last post), I will be starting my thesis in January which I’m so excited about (and also very scared and nervous). I plan to write about the whole process in case others are going to do the same and are curious about what that’s like.
I also plan to get back to writing for my lovely blog MarisolLoves.com and explore my creativity here. 🙂 Thank you for reading this, if you are reading it and we’ll read each other soon. ☺️
