Hello everyone. Sorry, leave of absence. It’s been a very busy… couple of weeks? Months? Neither would surprise me at this point.
So a pretty majorish thing happened the last week. I was talking to my advisor over the summer and I asked him for some advice about Grad school and whether that was a realistic option for me. Some context first….
I love Astronomy and I’m pretty good at it. There was one semester where I took 4(?) Astronomy classes and a math class and I did really good in them. On tests I was usually setting the curve. So you can imagine my disappointment when I didn’t get an A 😞. Anyway, during that semester, I was in the zone, even though I was working 5 days a week. I had a routine where I would work from 7 – 2, and then go to school to study and do homework and hang out with all the other nerds in the Astronomy department. Well the rest of my schooling did NOT look like that. I took classes that I didn’t really care about and I didn’t focus on school as much as I should have. I literally got a 2.63 GPA because I took a bunch of classes I didn’t care about (oceanology) or took on too many classes. In my last semester, I took 6 classes, plus my senior thesis AND getting a presentation ready for AAS. It was not a very pleasant last semester to say the least.
Anyway I hinted to my advisor that I MAY not have been the best student, and if there were any realistic options for me if I decided to get a higher degree. Well, it turns out there’s this wonderful program out there could the bridge program, and its supposed to basically get you admitted to a Masters program, where you would then get mentoring and kind of coached into how to do a PhD program.
Honestly, if there’s anything I need, it’s that coaching and mentoring. I’ve already looked into the sites and some of the faculty at those sites and it looks very promising. So I’ll keep you up to date on that search and what not.
Thanks for listening and coming to my TED Talk. Oh and just for the sake of pretty pictures and actually doing something Astronomy related, here is an rough draft of an image I made with GAIA data of M31.
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