Wednesday, February 15, 2012

The game has changed

So, aside from ripping off Tron for the title, the grad school stories never get boring, do they?

The last time I talked about Grad School on here, I talked about how I was focusing on a new program for grad school. That is still (mostly) the case.

I have this nasty tendency to have a hard time settling on one thing and consequently putting myself in a situation I shouldn't be in. I decidedly managed that one here.

At the beginning of this semester, I began to have some doubts regarding whether I was actually doing the right thing by looking into a different program. Would it ultimately take me where I wanted to go? I started thinking that maybe I just switched because I was getting burned out on everything last semester.

I spent some time thinking about it, and ultimately decided that maybe I did kind of act on a knee-jerk reaction to a string of setbacks. This all came very (very) late in the application cycle, so there's no real doubt that I picked probably the least opportune time to have that change of heart.

I managed (with some luck) to switch my application at one university to Aerospace Engineering. Deadlines had passed at other universities, so I didn't bother there.

As it stands, I have not yet heard back in any official context from any of the universities I applied to. That said, some of the unofficial communication I've had seems to imply that the writing is on the wall - and that is that I should probably be considering what my other options are after May. These options are definitely not what I want to have to resort to, but I may have no other choice.

Ultimately, I have no one other than myself to blame should I wind up in that situation - after all, it was me that chose to change directions - twice, really.

So at this point, I'm decidedly even more in the dark than I was when I began, and this time I'm not so sure if it's the fun kind of dark. A lot will be decided in the coming weeks, and I can't honestly say how those hammers will fall.