Hiatus is Over

I didn't mean to stop blogging for the past couple of weeks. Life managed to intervene and my focus has been elsewhere. For the first time in over 8 years I have set foot in a classroom. I've always loved school and learning. So I am excited about being back in classes. I just finished my second week at NCSU. My Finance of Higher Education class combines some basic economic theory with policies and practices of funding in higher education. For all the talk about economics in the class, it's actually kind of interesting. Research Methods is interesting too, but it's going to be a lot of work. I have to write Lit Reviews for both classes which means a lot of extra reading on top of the weekly class readings. Oh, yeah, and I have to start my research.

For those of you who have been following along, I have struggled with my research topic. I didn't know if I wanted to go back to student behavior or maybe look at student perceptions of privacy laws, I just was undecided. In class on Monday, the professor explained that it should be something you have an interest in, but don't expect a bolt out of the blue and a flash of inspiration. Dang, if that's not what happened to me. Having worked with performing arts students at several institutions and having been a dancer myself, I want to research the experiences of performing arts students. I don't want to go into too much detail as it's still early and I need to do some preliminary work, but I'm excited about the topic, which is important if I'm going to live with this for several years.

Work has also picked up lately - my students started their first week of classes at Duke this week and there have been many e-mails and phone calls and questions. Not that it's a bad thing, I've just been burning the candle at both ends and I haven't really sorted out my new school/work routine yet. My goal for this weekend since I have no errands to run and no plans to speak of is to get my homework schedule straightened out and caught up on all the reading from last week and this coming week as well as start searching the library resources for information on my topic.

Busy busy busy, but isn't "back to school" time always like that?