What I do in Graduate School

I like my vacation. It's been a nice break from the daily 7.00 am to 1.00 am routine of the past Winter Quarter. Winter Quarter was one of the most hectic schedules that I've ever had in my life. At the outset, I thought that I wouldn't survive. I was miserable in the cold, and I was struggling with the course load. Over the quarter, I realized that I was doing a great job of juggling the coursework. Of course, it also meant that my social life was zilch. But, I'm getting used to this part of being a graduate student. However, when the grades for the assignments started coming in, my first thought was, "Whoa! This cannot be me." I wasn't sure if I was getting the right grades because they were all really good. I started hanging up the assignments on the wall above my desk to remind me that I am capable of turning in good stuff.

The time when I really struggled was during the first take-home examination. It was for a course titled 'Theory Building in Human Dimensions in the Social Sciences'. This was a very tough course taught by 3 professors, and we were 6 students in the class. The student-teacher ratio was perfect. This turned out to be the most fulfilling course in the end. The exam tested our knowledge of science, theory, trade-offs in research, designing proposals, surveys, experiments, and case studies. Answering each question was very, very traumatic. I felt that a part of me was dying after every answer. The end of every answer would see me holding my head in the deep recesses of my bed, shivering under my quilt (no exaggeration). I felt that I had turned in a very shoddily done exam, and was feeling like Gollum. At the end of the class, when we received our scores for the paper, I was in for a pleasant surprise. My score was superb, and the paper was littered with 'well dones', 'great jobs', and 'goods'. I was thrilled that day. I will always cherish that feeling because it tells me that I have the potential to do good work.

Now, I am turning in some tables for my advisor's research. I conducted around 30 interviews throughout December and January, and now we are writing up a report for our Lab. The interviews were about stakeholder perceptions of watershed planning in three watersheds in Ohio, and what they think they learned from it. Having studied watershed development in India, the differences between the planning processes in India and the U.S. are of course vast. This is one of the themes that I will be researching for my dissertation. Topics of participation, equity, and sustainability are what catches my eye these days. I have just finished the first draft of my proposal, and have to begin the second draft incorporating the tremendous amount of feedback that I have received from my professors. I hope to finalize my proposal during the Spring Quarter, and then in the Summer I hope to hunt for interesting cases in India to study. There is a lot of work to be done. However, through the last two quarters, I now know that I can do it :)