By Amy Nielsen

Oh bother. I have just discovered exactly how lazified I have become over this two-week spring break.

While my break was anything but quiet, I did get a lot of relaxing done. I spent the two weeks off working on everything I had put off for the previous month as I wrapped up a tough second term in my Master’s program.

It’s Sunday already which means it’s the day the summer term starts. My school meets on a trimester schedule; September to December, January to April, May to July with August off. Trimesters are 15 weeks. As a mom, I just cannot bring myself to discuss my education in trimesters. Not only would I have to go through six trimesters, I then have two more trimesters – I know - of internship to follow.

It makes it feel much too much like I will have to endure labor again. Thanks, but no thanks. This is going to be hard enough as it is. I call them terms.

I have been very much enjoying my spring break, doing all sorts of non-school related things. While I do know some of my classmates were in fact lounging on the beach in Mexico for the two weeks, I spent it catching up on a whole lot of overdue medical appointments, family time, and de-crapifying my house. It felt nice to be able to focus on a space larger than the 15-square inches of my computer screen every day. I even have tan lines from the one day it didn’t snow!

I also spent quite a bit of time focusing on the calendar for the next three months as I add projects and assignments to our already brimming family summer plans. Summer is the time we travel a lot. Being retired military with a large number of still active duty friends, we have built-in locals everywhere we go. We take the summer to travel a bit farther afield. This summer is no different with trips planned to new states and familiar festivals.

This morning I took the time to sleep in for the last time for a while. I am stay-at-home Mom working on this Master’s. I also homeschool our girls, so no one except Papa has to get up with an alarm unless we choose to. That is not to say that we live without a schedule, we do, it just follows a ratio of time from wake up to sleep rather than specific hours for specific tasks.

That changes for me a bit as I start to work on my assignments again. I am still old school and have to discipline myself to the clock for my work. If I don’t I will never ever get to all of the assignments to be delivered. I don’t exactly start an alarm, I shift the ratios of time around in my day. Rather than taking my quotient of quiet in the morning, I move those two or so hours to the evening. Moving into summer this works with the longer days, I can spend the evening after the girls go to bed for my quiet, me time.

It takes a bit of getting used to, getting up and moving into school mode immediately, but by choosing what class and task I work on first, I can ease into it and get a lot of work done before the kids get up. That way if I end up running over, I still have the rest of the day to work with. I know I crash mid-afternoon like so many, so if I plan to be done with the hard work before then, I should be able to keep up.

This term I have two online classes and one on-campus class. The online classes are shaping up to be regular but complicated assignment patterns. Both have regularly scheduled posts, discussions, and quizzes, but they also both include choosing three of five case studies or additional discussion topics, and multipart final projects.

Mercifully, both classes are designed by tech savvy professors with personal online learning experience. I have no idea what the adjuncts leading the online sections will be like however.

I know for a fact the on-campus class I have will be difficult at best. The professor teaching it is different from the one who set it up as is often the case these days. The professor who set it up has only recently moved to another institution and was dearly beloved by both the student body and program faculty.

The new professor is asserting their control over the class by interjecting different information and requirements while not adjusting the pre-recorded materials or previous syllabus. Unlike my online classes that have work due every week of the 15-week term, the on-campus classes only meet for five weekends with less work between each meeting. This will be the second time this class will be taught by this new professor and I hope the kinks have been ironed out.

This week is all about the introductions. Both online classes have us doing virtual meet and greets with our background, topics of interest, program of study, and a few personal tidbits. Each class is taking the time to present the baseline for the course of study. It is the time to really get a handle on how this term is going to run.

So far, I think it will be very busy. I have a lot of reading, researching and writing to complete and lots of planned fun to work around. It is summer after all.  Let the juggling begin!

By Amy Nielsen

It’s spring break week. Who knew that Master’s programs got spring break too? I mean, I guess I figured they did, but never really thought about it. Do doctorate students get spring break? I suppose the question should be do we take spring break or just keep plowing along?

In my case, I am taking a break. Not only was last term a dozy in materials and projects, but it was super stressful in my personal life too. I got really sick over the winter with no time to deal with it. So now, with this beautiful two weeks of no classes, I am taking the time to slow down and rest. I know next term will be as full as this last and I need to be healthy and in the right frame of mind for it.

We get two weeks off between spring term and summer term. Last week I spent catching up with my personal life, getting into missed medical appointments, and generally reconnecting with everything and everyone not related to school. I even read a novel and baked cookies.

This week, I need to make sure to not rev up too early for classes next week. I am planning something fun and not remotely education related each day. I will check in with my classrooms as they are open online already. I’ll print out the syllabi and the first weeks’ worth of assignments and set up my files. My books are mostly here and ready to go already. I still have to order the online toolkit we need for one class.

This past term was full of fascinating topics I really wanted to get deeper with but in the interest of time and keeping up with the lectures, I never went down those rabbit holes. Now I get to spend hours reading related yet tangential papers and surfing through professional pages searching for more tidbits to add to my project. Some people read romance, I read peer reviewed papers.

Eventually I will have to write a 50-page thesis to end out program. While I have a topic in mind, it is deep and expansive and could encompass a wide swathe of material. Now that I know a bit more about how the body works from my daily classwork, I can start to develop the outline for what I want to write about. This first pass at bullet points during one of two such spring breaks I will get in my Master’s career is proving to be not only fun, but re-invigorating to my research. I suspect I will spend next year’s spring break madly editing the thesis.

I really want to spend this week diving down those rabbit holes and working on tangential topics, and bullet points. Because I started this program with a solid, yet self-taught background, I am quickly learning where the tractor trailer sized holes in my knowledge base are. I am hoping to remedy some of those missing pieces this week as well. So I am starting with the basics and going up from there.

This serves two purposes. It fills out the beginning of the thesis, the part where one tells about the pathology of this condition, differences in presentation, the signs and symptoms, and traditional treatment courses. It also makes sure that I know that those gaps are cleared up in my own knowledge base. As the condition I am researching is one I live with, this is making for some very interesting discussions with my medical professionals.

While in class session, I don’t have time to breathe let alone research topics to my current line. I am too busy doing the class work to play. I am working hard to make sure every assignment I do follows my thesis project topic in order to not waste the research time. But, that leaves me precious little time for side trips.

I am a nut. I love to research. I love to learn new things. I love to find out that an assumption on my part is wrong and more importantly what the right information is. I like to problem solve. When I was told no such protocol existed for my condition, I decided it was my job to create one. So now I am learning everything I can about this topic, soup to nuts. It became the topic for my thesis and eventually my practice.

They, the grand They, say that if you do what you love you will never work a day in your life. I think I am learning this spring break that I love what I do. I love what I am learning. I can’t help but read about it when I could be reading about faeries or romance. I want to meet interesting people in my field to discuss theories of etiology and pathology. The snow has finally stopped falling here in upstate New York and I should be running for the hills to hike, but I’d rather run to the library and check out a fact in Grey’s Anatomy.

By Amy Nielsen

I had the opportunity to be part of yet another dreaded group project in my Master’s of Nutrition program this past week. It was the culmination of a 15-week class and it was a live, in-class presentation.

Everyone dreads group work. I kind of like it. I’m that sick, twisted one who likes logistics, planning, gathering, and sorting. I adore working with other dedicated, passionate, professionals with drive and creativity. What I don’t do is the tech side. I cannot make a pretty presentation– that’s why I work with a team – I can hand all of my research over to the member who is good at that part.

What I do not put up with in a group project, is someone who decides they hate group projects and their solution is going to be to ignore everything to do with it. And then, get combative when confronted with their lack of involvement.

Group projects are part of school, any school. Suck it up, put on your big girl panties and do it. If the team is good, and ours was, the team will find a way for each member to participate to the best of their abilities and work within their strong suit. This is how you grow a successful team.

My school is a small specialized school hosting both online and on campus portions of our program. The students mostly travel in for weekend-long intensive classes. This class in no different, with five weekends spent on campus and a month between each meeting. Between classes students communicate through our school email or informally on Facebook.

Our project was an hour-long presentation on a topic of great debate. We were teamed up in groups of about eight by the professor.  Within that structure, we decided to break into smaller teams of two to tackle each section of the topic thoroughly as there was a plethora of information to sift through.

It became obvious from our first team meeting where our weakest link was going to fall. Even at that very first meeting she was argumentative and refused to offer suggestion or solutions when asked. Several days later, our first online meeting was no better. She was an hour late to a two hour call, unprepared, and unwilling to catch up.

That was a month ago.

Since then the team created a cohesive, well-planned, organized presentation. We worked hard through serious technical difficulties, having to switch platforms completely half way through. We culled more data than we collected. We could have easily presented for two hours with the amount of material we gathered. Together we cherry picked exactly the right phrasing to support our case with graphics and case studies.

Last week, at our call two days before we were to turn in our supporting documents and slide deck – before we all had to spend the following day traveling to campus from our far flung homes - our weak link decided to rear her head and join the program. Joining the call late, as always, she was downright combative with the rest of us. That was when she was actually intelligible, as most of the time we couldn’t even understand what she was saying, she was that drunk.

After another difficult call the night before our presentation, she decided to go into the presentation online at midnight, after we had turned it in, and change around not only her section - changing wording and even removing graphs and pictures – but also her partner’s section.

Her partner happened to be up, working on another exam, when, thankfully, weak link gal called to have her look at the new material that had been added. The partner messaged the rest of us at one in the morning in tears. So away we went to fix it and resubmit in the wee hours of the morning we were to present, when the deadline for submissions had long passed. We hoped we would still pass as a team as this professor is adamant about deadlines.

During that late night/early morning kerfluffle, we made the decision to stand up as a team and call her out to our professor.

This was one of the hardest decisions I have had to make academically. To call out a teammate on a project the morning of the presentation – to potentially cause her to fail the class – is a huge deal. Here we were, as a team, as a cohort, and as early professionals, doing work in a style we will encounter for the rest of our professional lives and she was going to take credit for work she didn’t do. Worse yet, she was going to take credit for something she actively worked against.

This became about not only her personal integrity, but also my personal and professional integrity. I am moving into a field that is emerging in the health care world. To say I have to have more professional integrity than the entire rest of the field put together is an understatement. I know that we are fighting against big pharma and the entrenched biomedical world. Without my professional integrity, my research means nothing. My professional integrity starts now, in school, with these colleagues.

Moving forward, these fellow students will become fellow practitioners. Do I really want someone with that work ethic and moral compass to be viewed with the same professionalism I am? No way. Her actions diminish my professional integrity. My personal integrity and ethical compass say I need to stand up and call her out.

As it happened, we emailed the professor our concerns. Before calling class to order, he met with our team, minus the offender as she hadn’t yet arrived. Weak link gal was almost an hour late for class, not to even mention we had agreed to come in an hour early to make sure we were good after the night’s debacle, so really two hours late. The professor listened, asked several questions of us to clarify our disagreement, and then told us she wasn’t passing the class already and that this just clinched it for him. He would be bringing this up with her academic advisor and follow the school’s route for discipline.

Personal and professional integrity comes from within, but sometimes one has to stand up to make sure the underlying tenants of that integrity don’t get undercut by a current of easy complicity. It would have been easier, less stressful, and certainly less emotional, if we had just let her slide. But I can’t swallow that she, in her current state, will be a representative of my profession. So, I stood up.

By Amy Nielsen

That moment you realize you have not only hit the sophomore college slump, but that it exactly coincides with exam week, presentation week, new client week, travel week, new sport season kickoff and husband on extra double shifts week.

Yeah. That week.

I already feel like I haven’t slept and it’s not even Monday yet.

The only saving grace is that the public school system is on spring break this week here so my homeschooled older girl doesn’t have swim practice on top of this all.

Somewhere in there I am supposed to fit in at least two medical visits for myself. I’ve been not so well lately and my medical team is working up a possible new diagnosis to add extra chaos to my existence. This means adding at least one day-long procedure into this mix. Not gonna happen.

It’s times like this, when I am recovering from a medical flare, when every single appointment seems to need to be on the same day, when I have already written 15 pages on the first five questions of a 10-question take home exam, when even the set in stone ever wobbly military schedule rears its ugly head, that I realize - I got this.

I have a plan. I have time. I have the intestinal fortitude to do what it takes to make each project this week be the best work I can provide at this juncture. I am not shrinking from the challenge. Rather it is buoying me up to greater heights of productivity and work that surpasses my norm. I am working this tool box of chaos quenching tricks I have gathered in my time on this planet like an octopus with an escape plan.

This is not to say I enjoy working under pressure.

Ok, I lied. I’m supposed to say that I don’t like to work under pressure. That it kills me and that I wish I had it less crazy.

Actually, I do. I love it. I love the pace, the drive, the dedicated focus that this kind of hard core, crazy living requires. I thrive on it. It is also the part of me that loses people very quickly as I go farther down the rabbit hole into the caterpillar’s world of the last throws of a deadline.

I can’t stay here for long. It is not really all that healthy to be working this hard, for anyone. But like any training, like any coaching situation, and learning environment that stretches you – that teacher asks you to sprint at some point. It builds up reflexes. It sharpens the focus. It shines glaring lights on shortcomings and weaknesses.

It’s no different in academia. This end of term insanity is all about learning to work in the hardest conditions you will face. It’s the sprint at the end of the marathon. It’s learning if you really have the need to put in every effort possible.

Now, in this final week stretch of the term, with everything barreling down on me like that proverbial freight train, I feel like I am not only managing, but thriving in a way I haven’t in decades. I have always been a project junkie. I was a theater designer for a while, and then I did special events. I enjoy having a new focus and a whole tool box of solutions to creatively toss at it under the pressure cooker of a short deadline and meager budget. That budget in this case is my aging body’s ability to bounce back after an all-nighter spent with doctored caffeine and power point slides. Or not.

I have spent a large amount of time over the last few years working very hard to not be in this overdrive, break neck pace all the time. I have worked to deepen my well of peace and stamina so I don’t end up burning myself out when I light the candle at both ends – with a blow torch. I learned to not allow the chaos to become disordered.

The mind has more tools and tricks than ever before, the body is working on its second wind, and the clock is ticking. I have exams to write, presentation scripts to edit, client materials to gather, and kids to feed once in a while.

Bring it on, I got this. With the peace and grace and stamina no twenty-something can touch.

By Amy Nielsen

It’s midterm week and we are starting to get underway with the dreaded group project. There are eight of us this time. Not only is it a group project, it’s an hour-long, live group presentation in guise of a court case. Did I mention there are eight of us on the team?

Sweet baboons on a brick if I make it out of this alive I will have earned my blankity blank Master’s degree.

I learned a very important lesson today. I was awoken to the fact, yes fact I think now, that I am completely not the person I once was. I met her face to face today and I think I am very definitely not there anymore.

This project is being coordinated long distance and then culminates with the live group presentation the last day of class on campus. For the majority of the time working on this we are at our remote locations scattered around the east coast. Which means all communication is done via this little box in front of me.

I used to work in a highly technical field, lighting design. I left the field just as a huge technology shift happened, the blue LED was invented and the Silicon Valley tech boom got hot. I am – now – a died in the thrift store wool sweater, mason jar tea drinking, rural woods living, luddite of sorts. Which is terribly odd.

One might think I am going to say that I left the field because the tech got away from me. But the reality is that I left because the art went out of it for me. I’m an energy freak. I dig vibrational energy, be it sound waves from a grooving drum circle, the tangible waves of light in incandescent bulbs or fire, the heat waves on a still August day. Lighting before LEDs was a very different art because the frequency of the light was different.

LEDs, the fixtures they are housed in, and the programs needed to control them, are so above my frequency now that my little ole central nervous system says no, Ma’am. It messes with my circadian rhythm. Too much time on the computer and I go tilt. Inevitably I end up on here a lot more than is healthy for me.

So I left the art I loved because the instruments didn’t sing to me the same way. I got too wrapped up in having to learn new tech. When I left the field of lighting design, it broke my heart. I found my heart in the human body, how it works, and how it is so very cool. I moved away from that higher energy because it didn’t serve me to one that does.

What does this have to do with this exercise in stamina of a group project? Eight means someone becomes the defacto team organizer. She is undoubtedly extremely efficient in her role of herding us cats. She is very tech savvy and very much of this new web-based everything world that I just shudder at. Her energy is about nine thousand times faster than mine.

Now I am by no means a complete computer neophyte. I do manage to write this weekly blog, I have a very active Facebook account where I am often reminded that I overshare and crosspost, and I can manage complicated EBSCO database searches. I cannot, however, produce anything more than a basic word document.

I emailed the gal in charge of the slides for the link to where she wants me to put what I have worked on for the last two weeks. To which, rather than just giving me the link, she replies with all of the places she has already posted the link and why haven’t I seen any of them and shouldn’t I know better?

Asking much forgiveness and with great noises that I do in fact get her 7,000 notices, emails, texts, and message board posts about what she is waiting on from us, I asked her to please give me the link so I can try to figure out how to copy a slide into the thing she has already set up for us to use.

I feel like I am getting a side eye with an exasperated humph from my gmail account as I open the reply to see the link.

I click. Something happens to my laptop and it magically opens a window into her world I guess. I click on the file she has labeled for me. I see a slide. Something I recognize. So I do as I do in my presentations and I copy and paste a slide from my computer into that place.

Somehow all 22 I have created appear in the new window. It looks like confetti appearing on the screen to me. Kind of pretty in a mesmerizing way.

Wait, I was trying to copy one slide. Do I dare try to delete a slide? On hell no. I got them there. No going back now. I’ll just blow it up. Never delete on someone else’s stuff.

I can’t find a save button. It’s nowhere. I cautiously explore a drop down box. Nope, not there. Decision time. I’m a big girl and I must trust in google docx. I send up a prayer to St. Bartholomew, patron saint of bookbinders, and close the tab.

I count to ten. Don’t ask why. You do it too.

I open the tab.

The slides are still there!

*BING*

I am curtly informed by our defacto Capitan that I am going to have to up my power point game if I want my slides included in the presentation, and by the way I only get ten. They are due by Friday, midnight.

I sip my chaga tea from my mason jar and shift my thrift store wool sweater around. I enjoy not running at that frequency anymore. If I make it through this presentation, I will have earned my Master’s degree.

By Amy Nielsen

Deep in the highlands of Scotland, in the streambeds and shallow river bottoms, in the chill of early spring, salmon spawn hatch. They begin to grow and learn this place they call home. Living in the rivers and loch of the highlands, feasting on a bounty seen few other places in the world.

Three years they are this salmon, they have territories of their own. They become aware of their place in this environment and are well in it. Then when they reach a size at a time only whispered to them among the reeds, the calling happens and they start to swim. In great numbers they are swept downstream in the beginning of an epic journey.

These parr navigate waters often slow and lazy, sometimes deep and cool, mostly rough and tumbling. They swim past windswept hills, through endless prickling moors, eventually to the more curated fish tunnels and loch ladders of the inhabited coastline. And then suddenly it is time.

In the lengthening days of May with the rivers warming, the parr begin to transform. The salmon’s thyroid is triggered by the change in salinity of the water, the change in day light, and the change in temperature to begin to smolt. The fish becomes a different fish by shedding its outer layer and recalibrating its gills for salt.

Once the transformation is complete and the new fish – the adult salmon - has emerged and cannot live in the brackish water and they move to open water. Swimming free of the coastline and out.

Out to sea. Into an immensity of a proportion so vastly different from where they started that they are made completely new for the experience. To spend a whole other lifetime in an exquisitely new environment at depths unknown in locations unfathomable. Salmon disappear while out to sea. No one knows quite where they go or what they learn, but we know they never forget how to return home.

So after a time spent living far and large, the adult salmon forego eating and swim hard, harder than they have ever swum before. Facing odds and obstacles beyond measure. Through that brackish water into the fresh, without wasting the energy or sparing a second thought to return to a freshwater fish. They have a drive to get home. To spawn.

If they make it to that place, the one they can only know by the faint echo of memory like so much a half remembered perfume, they finally come to rest.

Oh but what a frantic bash it is as they fight and slash, bite and slap for the bed in which to lay their so precious mother load. The boiling shallows writhe with flashing red and silver, white clouds billowing as the wisdom of the journey and the magic of transformation and secreted among the gravel and reeds.

Complete from the existence lived and emptied of the knowledge, this salmon move to another plane of existence on yet another epic journey into a new environment. One where they don’t even need gills to breathe.

In Scottish folklore, salmon are known as the fish of knowledge for they always know the way home again. They are the form that Taliesin, the greatest Bard ever to live and holder of the knowledge of Kings, took on his journey over the sea to return to Scotland as a babe on the shore with eyes of grey shining bright. Salmon are kept in sacred wells and fed on hand picked acorns.

I tell you this tale because it is not dissimilar to my own educational journey thus far. I won’t tell you where on the path I am, that’s for me to discover. My question to you is, where are you on your journey with the Salmon of Wisdom?

It was a cold and stormy night. The rain hammered on the RV roof. Slowly it gentled to a lulling pattern pushing her deep into much needed restorative sleep. Upon waking, she stretched, yawned, and heard the distinct toot of a car alarm – bolting upright she realized she had over slept and was late to class. How embarrassing since she got to park the RV overnight a few hundred yards from the classroom.

Nothing like waking up in the parking lot and still being late to class.

My master’s program is primarily online, but there is a physical campus and they do hold classes there so I am able to take both. In fact, for my state accreditation, I must take a certain number of credits on campus each term.

Campus is a leisurely five-hour drive from home through winding scenic byways skirting the major metro-centers along the east coast. It’s a drive I have done countless times in my travels along the eastern seaboard and one I love. There are good food stops, far flung friends, and beautiful vistas to be had.

There are actually several students from within an hour drive of my hometown who also commute to school these weekends we have to be on campus. Most of them choose to fly from one of two local airports. I find it interesting that we live in one of the few areas of the country where the rail system is actually very good, yet none of us opt to use it. I may have to explore that option one of these trips as I love train travel.

I see these five weekends each 15- week term as mini intensive educational vacations. Which, in turn tells me I have chosen the right career. Once this becomes the daily language and mode, I will feel like I am living a vacation wonderland. My eventual plan is to travel with my family in the RV teaching and seeing clients around the country who fit my very specific niche of integrative nutrition.

This is my second visit to campus. I have taken two other classes for the school, but they were held in a different location so this is the second time I am really on campus proper. The last time was a short one day visit, class was in the room we are assigned, and the professor lectured on his expectations and the major overview of the class.

I diligently checked the weather, being February in the northeast, and I decided it was going to be just warm enough to warrant pulling the RV out of winter storage for the weekend to blow out her cobwebs. Also being February in the northeast, I decided not to de-winterize the plumbing system for this short trip. To say it was colder and wetter than expected would be a bit of an understatement. I was glad to have left all of the extra blankets from our last chilly fall trip on board.

Next week my husband takes her out for his yearly training in Virginia. It will be his first solo voyage. In April I have two more school weekends and we have a short trip planned to visit a historical site for our daughter’s school. We already have our summer plans set up for travel to a new state.

We have this RV so we can use it for events and now classes at a distance from home where hotels charge center city rates even in the farthest burbs. This is exactly the kind of trip we want to be able to take as a family while one or more of us work through our educational trajectories, kids included.

I figure we are about two years out from living at least half time traveling in the RV from conference to lecture to clients. My career trajectory will take me to conferences and institutions for the next few years doing research and creating protocols with specific clients. We are hopeful that my husband’s career track will take a decidedly more parental tone after many years away with deployments and military life.

The ability to move from a tethered life to one of such freedom is intoxicating. It is becoming less of an oddity to be a traveler now. There are whole websites and blogs dedicated to “workamping,” travel nursing, and seasonal employment. Taking off and leaving the rat race behind to create your own yellow brick road is a growing trend. Just look at the proliferation of tiny house builders and young somethings eschewing massive material mansions.

The experiences we will gain and the friendships we can continue by virtue of our wheels is the whole reason we have this rig. By being truly dedicated to my master’s program and willing to work as hard as I play, I am hoping I create a dynamic career that leads to a life filled with experiences that my whole family can benefit from.

Next month the weather will be warmer, spring will have really sprung, I have plans in the works with local school friends to spend time with my kids. I just need to organize my husband’s time off from work so we can do a trial run with us all. This time I can guarantee I will not be late to class if my kids are in the RV with me.

By Amy Nielsen

In the continuing saga of my quest to pass organic chemistry, this time with feeling - the second time around, I made my first of what I am sure will be many incredibly sophomoric mistakes. I got cheeky with my professor and he docked me points from an easy A for it.

Every other week we are required to write a short one to two paragraph check-in post, detailing how we are doing and how the teaching team can support us is learning the material. Simple. Done in 15 minutes on a long day. There are three specific questions to answer, all open ended and opinion rather than hard fact with citations.

Slam, bam, easy A.

Unless you tell your professor you feel like the text book is laughing at you, even though you are trying your level best to make it work this time. I was much too familiar in my tone for a Master’s level interaction between a student and professor. He docked me three points for that sass and not answering the questions as assigned.

Where on Earth did I get off telling him that my textbook is laughing at me you might ask? Well, I cannot keep the letter abbreviations of the elements in a molecule in the right order as I am dyslexic. OH often looks like HO and that chemists write them interchangeably makes it even worse. So yes, when I get silly stupid after reading about this stuff for several hours in a row, I really feel like it is laughing at me.

I have a really hard time with this material due to this learning disability. I am trying to keep my head above water with humor this term. I often make chemistry jokes to my friends. I am trying to keep this subject as engaging on as many levels as possible so I can find what hook makes it finally all fall into place.

I have also learned to keep it to myself. I enjoy engaging with people and I am finding this distance learning gig to be pretty alienating. I have not spent much time one-on-one with other students either on campus or online. In every single class we are required to post and respond in a pseudo-conversation with other students monitored by the teaching staff. But you never really get the character of the person behind the keys in those stilted academic connections.

Those required check-in posts are also not the place to bring in one’s personal coping mechanism used to deal with the overwhelming sense of anxiety about the prospect that this one class could derail the entire plan. I know that I could easily start to struggle with the material in this class again. I need every bit of help I can get and offending the professor is a bad start.

I am terrified that I will end up just under the passing score again. Each point I lose is critical. I know that there are two timed exams that I will have difficulty with. I need to save up all of the points I can to spend them there and still pass. I need to play nicely and by the rules and not make waves. It’s better if I just do the work with my head down.

I am afraid that I have now earned an extra look this term. If I need help, I feel like I am going to earn even more looks, making it harder to just pass the dang class. He made no comments on my post, just docked the points. So everything here is completely my personal fabrication. But I suspect I need to shape up.

Going forward I will make sure that I answer the questions in a more dignified and worthy manner. I will remember that this is an academic institution. I will remember that each interaction is scrutinized in a professional setting and that this program is setting me up for success in my professional career. I can express my personality and my coping skills in other more subtle ways in more appropriate forums. It was a tap on the wrist I needed to get back on track.

By Amy Nielsen

There are 22 years between when I earned my Bachelor’s degree and when I made my decision to get a Master’s degree. In that time, a whole lot of life happened, including a career in the field I graduated into, two kids, and a stint as a Navy spouse.

I was lucky, I graduated from college into a field where work is really, truly, always available if you are creative about marketing yourself and use your connections well. I decided to leave that field when I lost my drive for it. I had followed the almighty dollar and strayed into a part of the woods that looked nothing like my dream. I had a few bucks in the bank and no strings. So when the company folded I was not crying rivers.

I remember the evening after I locked up the office for the last time. It was surreal dropping the keys into sealed in a FedEx pouch to ship back to the regional manager. I sat out on the patio listening to the hum of the highway mixed with bullfrogs and crickets thinking – geesh, I can do anything I want this summer. I can do anything I want with my life now. I have time. For the first time in my life I have time to figure out what I really want to do.

So there I sat, feeling like an adult with the world ahead of me. I was exactly 30-years-old and I was a free bird! I made a list of things I was good at. Things I liked to do. Things I wished I could do. Things I knew I was never ever in a million years going to do. Things I was bad at. I asked a lot of people what I liked to do. I tried really hard to hold up a mirror and see me. Perhaps for the first time ever – and that created a tidal wave through my life upturning a whole lot of other things – but let’s keep to this wave.

So I set about choosing what I was going to do next with as much dedication to detail, cost to resale potential, and personal fit as most pay to their first luxury car. You see, while I dearly loved my first career, I never really thought about it as a career when I was picking it. I’m not really sure any high school senior can make that decision.

In that summer of introspection I decided that what I really loved was food. I was a good home cook. I had a good understanding of food and it’s implications within culture as a whole. I was worldly and had travelled extensively. So I decided to go to culinary school and see where it went. I knew I was not interested in restaurant kitchens. But I really had no idea what I could do otherwise. I though perhaps I would write a book, or something.

My first day of culinary school was September 11, 2001.

Upon graduation I knew I knew a whole lot more about food and how it has been manipulated in the classical French tradition. I could make a soufflé that didn’t fall, aspic covered salmon, and perfectly poach an egg, but I still had no idea what I wanted to do in the industry. So I went into a kitchen and did basically the same job I had been doing in my previous career, only difference was the medium. But I still missed a drive, a spark. I loved the kitchen but I was – to be honest – bored.

So I packed up my life and moved to a seaport to follow a Sailor. I didn’t get back into cooking at what I considered a professional level until almost 10 years later. The Navy life will do that to ya.

In the intervening years however, I spent a lot of time thinking about or talking about or playing with food. I dabbled in lots of parts of the food world from learning new techniques from international neighbors or new regional ingredients in the supermarket or finding a beloved item half way around the world because someone else missed home.

I read a lot. I read everything I can about food, from the New York Times food section to blogs on deep end fermentation to cutting edge research in phytochemistry to current law on licensing for integrative health practitioners and how patent law pertains to herbal formulae. I met people who use ingredients in ways I have never seen or called them names I didn’t know. I collected this all in my little foodie brain bank.

And still I had no idea how to regurgitate it all so someone would listen to me and not get bowled over by my over-zealous enthusiasm for the expansive topic that is the world of food. I know a lot of weird things about food.

I was directed to a program that seemed as broad on the topic as I was and was a good place to perhaps distill more clearly what it is that I really love about the world of food – other than Sacher Torte mit schlagg and deviled eggs. The year-long intensive was the kick I needed to see where I might be able to fit in outside of a kitchen. It gave the chance to meet people doing foodie things that had nothing to do with being in a kitchen. I was stoked. Better yet, there is an emerging field into which I felt I could maybe fit. It was the start of a spark.

It was also the bridge to the Master’s program I am enrolled in now. I am finally finding that I am with a bunch of students with drive and intensity that matches my own for talking about all aspects of food and culture. I am much happier talking about changing food access policy during the week and playing with meringue on the weekend.

The point of this ramble through my whys and wherefores of my educational stepping stones is to impart to you that time is not your enemy, time is your friend.

As I work my way through this process I keep reminding myself that no path is set in stone and that I am the only one who can decide if it suits me. My strength is breadth, I see a bigger picture and a wider scope. I am not good at the daily little fiddly bits. I also keep reminding myself that each step in this road is something learned. Now is the exact time for me to be trying out new ideas, learning hard lessons, and making connections. The career part will sort itself out eventually.

Don’t let the howling winter weather fool you, spring is right around the corner. And that means scholarship deadlines are nearly due.

There are thousands of scholarship opportunities for students of every age, race, location and academic discipline. Some are even have very specific requirements that include heritage, club membership or even hobbies meaning that the pool of applicants is tiny and your chance of winning is high.

But first, you have to find those scholarships and apply for them.

Below is a list of websites that specifically cater to military families and either host or have compiled comprehensive lists of scholarships for military members and their families:

https://www.usveteransmagazine.com/list-of-military-scholarships-for-service-members-spouses-and-dependents/

https://militarybenefits.info/base-clubs-offer-scholarships-for-military-spouses/

https://www.hopeforthewarriors.org/transition/military-spouse-scholarships/

https://www.scholarships.com/financial-aid/college-scholarships/scholarships-by-type/military-scholarships/

https://www.military.com/spousebuzz/2018/01/05/help-your-military-teen-apply-2018-scholarship.html

https://www.vfw.org/Scholarship/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAs9zSBRC5ARIsAFMtUXHHrX0CGjnlpm3M2D07DwmwSDABPP5iEiwMjR-dqm-p-wHhxnE0gJoaAuMlEALw_wcB

Below is a list of general scholarships available to a wider population, outside of the military:

www.collegescholarships.org 

https://scholarshipowl.com

www.scholarshippoints.com

https://www.infaithfound.org/newsgrants/scholarships?gclid=Cj0KCQiAs9zSBRC5ARIsAFMtUXGNdNqUyuKDGTqCCqi4qzdvX68A8GOK_8NXl9RbOoj_XWYiNX7-V4waAg57EALw_wcB

To conduct your own scholarship search online, begin by searching by school, state, choice of major or career field. Also search for scholarships given out for athletes and other types of hobbies.

If you find a scholarship that you think you fit the qualifications for, but the deadline has passed, post a note in your calendar to search it again in the coming months. If you qualify again, be certain to apply before the next deadline.

Searching and applying for college money may seem like a fruitless effort. There are thousands of people vying for much of the same money. But if you persevere and continue to fill out each form attentively and carefully you never know how or when that dedication might pay off, or pay in full for your academic dreams.