So yesterday I wrote, during my initial frustration, about how I am hard on myself. And about how I need to take it easy. Here is my dilemma...a bit of a catch 22. Maybe.
I'm a decent writer. I don't necessarily think I could be a professional by any means, but for the most part, my thoughts come across clear. Yesterday in my "easier" class this semester, our professor gave us his thoughts on graduate school and writing. He mentioned that we could all stand to improve, and gave us precise reasons why each of us received the grade written on our papers. Yes I was a bit disappointed with my low A/high B; but he said something that really hit me, and caused my frustration to subside. He said, "Some of you can really write, but we can all, myself included, stand to improve." He went on to mention how he thought that writing was one of the weakest points for today's graduate students. It is so true though. All of us go in there, expecting to get these perfect grades on our papers. We are all, or at least a vast majority of us are, perfectionists. We get highly irritated when we see a B, or even an A- (case in point, yesterday evening). But, if we are constantly getting A's, how are we supposed to push ourselves to improve. We will constantly be floating in this world where we think we are simply going to school to get a piece of paper, not to learn. Imagine that! Someone going to school just for the degree! I have never heard of anyone who did that! [Insert deeply sarcastic facial expression here]. To be honest, my writing could stand major improvement. My blog would be a lot better, it probably wouldn't take me as long to write good, decent papers, and it would just make me a much more competitive person in the workplace. However, for some reason, I am ghastly afraid of seeing a "B" on my transcript. I got them in undergraduate school, and look where I am now! I'm fine! I have a good job, work with intelligent people. It didn't deter my career path at all. So why am I still afraid. Perhaps it's because of all the rumors that "Graduate school should not be hard; you should not be there if you can't get straight A's. Not to mention the fact that if you don't get straight A's, good luck going for that Doctorate." Oy! I hate pressure, I really do! So that's another one of those lingering goals - dispensing with my fear of imperfection.
In other news, my running program is going very well. I'm finding that, for the most part, I actually look forward to my runs now. Yay! I might actually finish this thing after all! The only bad part is, I need to learn to stretch much better - one of my hamstrings was REALLY sore yesterday.
Okay, enough of this online-journaly entry. I just haven't had the time to write in my paper journal a lot lately and thought I would at least try to throw out some of my thoughts on here; maybe someone else can benefit from them. :)
Over the next week or so, I will be writing a paper on career-oriented education. I have a feeling that may bring up a LOT of thoughts, and I am hoping to post some of them here. Stay tuned!
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