With the new year coming, people are starting to talk about their resolutions for the next year. A lot of my friends have graduated and are working which makes many of their goals completely different than mine. Making a plan to save for an apartment, crazy vacation, etc aren’t really things I’m able to do right now. But along those lines, at this point in my life I feel like I want my goals to include more than just school plans. And this is where the subject of this post comes from.

School at any level can pretty easily dominate a lot of your time, focus, and energy. However, when you get to the graduate level, you’ve been in school for so long that it is really important to look at other areas of your life, and make sure you’re making at least some progress there as well. I don’t want to graduate at 26 and feel like I’ve just graduated from high school in terms of all other areas of my life, and herein lies the importance of non-academic goal setting.

So here is my list of NON academic goals for 2011:

1. Start a travel fund. With TA and other positions available to graduate students, it is possible to stay on the positive side of your bank account. In the past, I have generally just thrown anything extra into a savings account and tried to forget about it, but I want to spend some of it now! I’m going to try to save $150 a month and get out of town once a term. There are quite a few places locally that I haven’t been to in a while like Victoria, Whistler, Seattle, and in the summer there is lots of camping and other things to do.
2. Max of 7 hours of TV a week. This may even sound like a lot of TV for most people, but I love watching TV! Over the past couple of years though, it’s maybe gotten a little ridiculous. I keep up with…almost everything, and I actually look forward to going home and plunking myself down in front of my friend the TV. The downside is that somehow an entire can magically disappear. There are a lot of other things I would like to do in the evenings besides TV, so hopefully chilling it on the all-eveningers will help me get started on those other things.
3. Take a picture everyday. Ok, this is a bit of a weird one, but I NEVER take pictures. I have maybe 5 pictures from 2010 (including the Olympics!) and it makes it easy to forget some of the cool stuff that’s happened. What I think about be kind of awesome, would be to get a photo album with 365 slots in it, and fill it with one picture from each day. AND with me cooling it on the TV, I might even go out and do stuff worth taking pictures of! I wonder if I can get the camera in my phone to overlay the date in the corner of the pictures. That would make organizing them a lot easier!
4. Cook something completely new once a month. Fairly self-explanatory; cooking can be really fun, and trying to make new things will hopefully re-interest me and get me out of my currently somewhat bland rut.
5. Go Snowshoeing. I’ve always wanted to and never had. Mountain Equipment Co-op does daily rentals for $12-15. Maybe I could make it a MEGA trip!

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