Awww....

I have been having a not very good week.

This is the second week of the summer school course I'm taking - I get to go home tomorrow!!!! and although I really enjoyed last week, this week, not so much.

Been really cranky, and having a LOT of very negative thoughts about whether I am really up for 2+ more years of Trent. I likes my house. I like Georgian ...I COULD just finish my MA and apply to go back and teach at the college level and....

well, yeah... be bored out of my skull within a few years and all ...but...

ANYWAY... today the secretary was in and not busy and I happened to think of my student evaluations .... almost didn't even ask for them because I was in SUCH a pissy mood... but I did it anyway and guess what????

They like me... they really like me LOL

Lots of really positive feedback from my students - comments about the variety of activities I offered and the effort I put into "helping us to better understand the literature" and they appreciated my use of technology and how quickly I responded to emails and so on.

s'almost enough to make me think I should keep going.

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Advantages of being a nontraditional student

I said in yesterday's post, Being a nontraditional student sucks? that I would post some of what I see as advantages of being a nontraditional student. So - here is a list:

1. As a nontraditional student, we tend to have a lot more life experience on which to draw. We have usually read more, had more experience dealing with businesses and with people, and have work experience that can go a long way to helping us to be able to apply what we are learning to what we already know. Assimulation is always easier than accomodation - and so we nontraditional students get to learn the easier way a lot more.
2. Nontraditional students are generally more disciplined (we have to be!) and professors like us because of it.
3. Nontraditional students are also usually closer in age to the professors, which can make for better relationships with them - especially important when it comes to reference letters and recommendations for scholarships.
   
4. Being able to better understand how our professors think makes it far easier to pick up on important clues about what they are looking for in essays and exams.
   
5. Nontraditional students understand the importance of the investment we are making in our education, and are more likely to take it seriously - again, a tendency that in my experience is often highly valued in an academic environment.
6. Nontraditional students are better at juggling than other students are - so we are typically less inclined to go into total meltdown at the midterm and end of every semester... not that we don't - but we usually manage to get through those stressful periods better than some.
   
7. Nontraditional students have connections that can help to support us while we are in school and also help us to get jobs when we are done.

Like my tag line says ....Nontraditional, mature, returning students ....no matter what you call us, we are a determined and resourceful bunch.

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Being a nontraditional student sucks?

That made me kind of sad - the fact that one of the search terms that showed up in my google analytics today was that being a nontraditional student sucks.

That has not been my experience at all - I think that being a nontraditional student can certainly be challenging - we nontrads tend to have a lot more juggling to do to make it all work. But we also have advantages that can make our experiences as nontraditional students pay off.

When I accomplish something as a nontraditional student, I take pride in the fact that I pulled it off in spite of all of the challenges I face. It means more, I think, to succeed when it's hard.

My degrees show that I can not just write papers and pass exams ... but also that I can juggle, organize, balance, and overcome.

Especially overcome. Being a nontraditional student can be really difficult. I've done it as a broke, burned out single mom; as a caregiver for someone with Alzheimers who needed a great deal of care and attention and who died here, in my living room, in the middle of a semester in which I was carrying a full load as a student and a full teaching load; and now, dealing with some pretty inconvenient health problems of my own.

When I walk across the stage and pick up my degrees, that means something. Of course, it means something for every student that makes it that far - but for me, it is a particular source of pride.

I'm not feeling so hot tonight so I'm off to bed - tomorrow I will write about what I see as advantages of being a nontraditional student.

But in the meantime, let me just say that I don't think that being a nontraditional student has to suck - and if you are someone that ended up here by searching "being a nontraditional student sucks" I hope you'll drop a comment - or send me an email - and maybe together we can find some solutions to make it work better for you. I would love to help ... that is exactly why I started this blog.

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They said it couldn't be done...

.... well, actually, 'twas I that said it couldn't be done.

Repeatedly ... everyone else kept saying that of course I would pull it off - I always do. Once again, they were right, and I was wrong.

I managed to get my last 20+ page essay submitted today.

Yay me!

That makes 3 big one and 3 little ones all doing in a very short period of time. The one I finished today, I am quite happy with, even .. the other two need more work but I ran out of time...

Anyway ... they are done. My proposal for the program is sent off to my advisor for review; all of the rest have been submitted.

Tomorrow I will revise my ethics application and fire that off, and get the rest of my first years' exams marked and their final marks calculated and sent off.

And then all I will have left is to write my major research paper. 50 pages, but I have 6 weeks to do it in.

After pulling off almost 100 pages of essays and so on in the last 2 weeks, I think I can manage that - especially since all of the papers I have done relate to the major research paper, so a lot of the research for it is already done.

Yay me.

I might just make it through this MA thing after all :)

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Nontraditional Students & Crisis of Confidence

Do you do it too?

I don't know if it's because I'm a nontraditional student or just because I am a total neurotic - but I hate, hate, HATE, handing in my essays any more.

I was up until 6:30 this morning finishing my CanLit one - at about 5:30 I started thinking

"OMG this is crap; I can't hand this in. I am going to fail! What if I fail? My last essay was crap too. Oh God, I'm going to fail!"

Got myself totally freaked out and even though I eventually did hit send on the damn email and go to bed for a few hours sleep, the pit of anxiety in my gut just will not go away.

I'm working, now, on my proposal re: my Major Research Paper. Everything I have done this year has been leading up to this paper. I have had the opportunity to talk to my advisor, other profs, get (and incorporate) feedback from them, fellow students, etc. I have read hundreds of academic articles. I have written essays related to smaller sections of the whole.

I know what I'm doing and how I am going to do it - and I can't seem to write a blessed thing.

Well, I can ... but then I just can't seem to keep my hand from hitting the Delete key.

Crap, crap, it's all crap!

I don't have time to be neurotic this week. I need to get this proposal sent off to my advisor so that she has time to review it before it has to be submitted to the department.

And then I still have another major paper (20+ pages) to write, and 20 essays to mark - although I think rather than torture myself with a block of 20, I'm going to start doing them a few at a time - would be nice to at least start seeing that number go down.

And maybe at least in comparison to those, my own work won't seem like such crap any more?

So.... what do you think? Is this a nontraditional student thing? Or am I just neurotic?

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