30 While 30 - Back to School!

One of my 30 While 30 goals is to make some progress on earning that PhD I never finished. The only things standing between me and greatness are a theory class, a preliminary exam, a literature review, and a dissertation. In December, I submitted an application to be re-instated to my PhD program. December 30th, I received notification that I had been re-admitted. On Tuesday, I started that theory class. It's official, I'm a "non-traditional" student. I remember that back when I was a naive 1st-year MA student I looked at the PhD students who had "real jobs" and families and wonder how in the world they made it work. As luck failure to complete my degree in a reasonable time frame would have it, 7.5 years, a marriage, and a 3-year old later, I'm one of the 30-something-year-old students who shows up to class in professional clothes and feels slightly self-conscious about carrying a backpack.


I used to have an office here, three floors from the top. Crosley Tower is one of the largest poured-concrete structures every made. It's also quite possibly the ugliest building I've ever seen in person. 8 windows per floor, no natural light in the hallways, and one bathroom (either men's or women's) nested under the stairwells in alternating floors.

It's a long uphill climb, as I've been out of the loop so long that there are three new faculty members to get to know, an entirely new prelim structure, and a ton of research to catch up on. My dissertation will be going in an entirely different direction than originally planned, given that there's been 5 years worth of development in cohabitation and I'm now in the health field. It just makes more sense to start over, and if I'm starting from a blank slate, I may as well choose a more relevant topic.

Whee!