What better way to re-introduce myself after a month-long blogging hiatus then with this video.

I swear, I may listen to this song every day between now and when I defend. My office mate was singing this tune Friday and this morning…and while it was fun to sing to on Friday, it really resonates on a Monday Morning.

This week I am home alone, and so my goal is to make myself miserable with working hard. Thus, I have resolved I will make each day infinitely better by listening to this song each morning to pump myself up! I suspect however, that if I work as hard as I hope to, “miserable” will shortly transform into “awesomeness” as it normally does when I see the fruits of my labour take shape (or is it get juicy?).

Moving on…or rather, backwards. Since the last post, I feel that quite a bit has happened:

I was lucky enough to go to Whistler for a week with my dad, and despite your *holiday* alarm bells ringing, I will have you know that I used the opportunity to work very hard, cross-train for the 5K (“cross” because I wasn’t allowed to run – thus the rower, bike, and elliptical were my poisons) and snowshoe every couple days. The result of that week? My Teaching Portfolio – it’s alive! This is a project I began in the fall and resolved to have “finished” by the spring and ta da! Nothing beats the motivation of future prospects. I say “finished” as a portfolio is always a work-in-progress, so what I really mean is a version that is complete enough to be published online. If any of you readers want to take a look and provide comments or feedback (as a reply to this blog post) I would happily welcome it!

Also completed: the St. Patrick’s Day 5k! I can’t believe I did it. And yes – I did it! I ran the whole thing, minus the forced walking bottleneck about 5 minutes in, which conveniently coincided with when my physiotherapist told me to take a walking break. My time was 36:18 and I am very, very proud. Last Monday morning I went to my physiotherapist to treat my exhausted ankle. It was swollen and sore, and ended up getting taped for 4 days. It made me feel like a REAL athlete. I’m so athletic I get my muscles taped. Bitchin’!

I recommend the St. Patrick’s Day 5k to anyone who is interested in starting to run. It’s not very competitive and instead is focused on having a good time. There are indeed prizes for fastest times, but there are also costume contests, and an irish-themed party afterwards. We had irish stew, cupcakes, lucky charms cereal, and more. It was amazing how much food they provided, especially since this is one of the cheapest races to sign up for! We were also given Granville Island pint glasses with the race logo and year printed on one side. You can pay to fill it up and have a true St. Pats celebration if you choose. The tag line is “Come for the race, stay for the party” – and boy is this true – a group of strangers challenging themselves and then celebrating together (community, anyone? One of my favourite things).

I definitely want to keep going with the running since I’ve come so far, and have picked out my ideal next race. The only snag is that this race coincides with the time I plan to defend, but conveniently I can register up to 2 days in advance of the race! So I plan to train as if I have signed up, but if the race ends up adding stress rather than relieving it during a very important time, I simply will not go ahead with it.

So those are my two very exciting developments. I’ll admit, I’m glad I can disappear for a month and come back with accomplishments under my belt. I will not let another month go by until my next update, but hopefully I can keep this pattern of achievements going. I believe I will – just last week I actually started writing. I’ve been in the “writing phase” for a while as I put it, but that included making an extensive outline for my supervisor, analyzing samples and planning. Now I’m actually writing the darned thing.

Hopefully by the next time I post I will have a significant portion of 1 chapter done (as per usual I will no jinx myself by saying what exactly) and be finished on the microscope. Oh, to be finished microscoping! My neck and general sanity dream for this day!

Until then…dreams of massages and running and general tomfoolery. Have a good few days, all.

Today I discovered what the best job in all the world is:

Answering letters written to Santa – or, in my case – Scuba Claus.

Scuba Claus is what we call the Vancouver Aquarium’s version of Santa – did you know that up until Christmas Eve he feeds fish, whilst swimming alongside them? This year, Aquarium visitors can leave a pledge to help the environment for Scuba Claus, and I help Scuba Claus write his responses back to the letter writers. It is so fantastic.

More broadly, volunteering keeps me sane. I believe strongly in volunteerism (and it’s ability to foster positive and strong connections to community) and have been doing so since high school. My first volunteer experience was required in order to graduate high school (seriously: excellent idea, Ontario school system!), which I spent running my hometown’s Community Services office at night during weekly legal aid sessions. Since then I’ve volunteered for a number of causes over the years, and now I spend my time at the Vancouver Aquarium. Volunteering for VanAqua has been such a wonderful experience; I’ve been able to flex so many muscles: imagination, play, curriculum development, leadership, teaching, learning. Yowza. What could be better?

I take great pride in my VanAqua Volunteer shirt.

Now that I’ve established what I’ve got going on (to put it most “loosely”), maybe my blog tagline makes more sense now. Basically, I will write about frustrations and successes I have as I continue/finish my thesis. I will post reflections about my teaching experiences, about working on my thesis in general, and likely about juggling thesis work and my extracurriculars.

I intend this to be a nice reflective tool for me; I hope having the blog will encourage me to reflect often and I may gain understandings about myself from posting often. For the readers…hopefully my life, probably better known as “my juggling act”, is interesting. Perhaps some of you other UBC bloggers have very similar experiences! I invite anyone who stumbles upon this blog to leave a comment.

Hi all (everyone and no one?),

I have created this blog with the intention of writing reflections on what it’s like to be a M.Sc., or more specifically, a M.Sc. student who is pursuing a decent load of extracurriculars, and has already realized her ideal career aligns better with a different subject than that of her thesis.

Let me fill this out with a little more detail.

I’m working towards my M.Sc. in Biological Oceanography in the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences. I love Oceanography and I love the fieldwork; I’ve been lucky enough to go on 2 research expeditions to the Arctic Ocean (more specifically, the Beaufort Sea)  and the North Pacific. I’m less enthusiastic about the lab work and intimidated by the reading, but it’s going okay. I hope to finish in a little while – but I won’t jinx myself by saying when.

I volunteer at the Vancouver Aquarium, which is a wonderful experience. This came about by my desire to get a little teaching experience. In my first semester as a M.Sc., I took a course called Teaching and Learning in the Earth and Ocean Sciences (EOSC516) which I fell in love with. I knew quite quickly my ideal career path involved pedagogy, but I didn’t know if I was into teaching kids, teens, adults….or simply discussing the theory, more “behind the scenes”. What I do at the Aquarium is volunteer with a School Program that brings in 2 classes from grades 5 to 12 weekly. I’ve been volunteering with this program since October 2009, and have gained experience teaching this wide range of ages. I have since concluded that although I love interacting with these students and seeing their excitement over the animals, I am more interested in teaching/”behind the scenes” work in higher education.

For the past 2 fall semesters, I have T.A.ed the course I mentioned above. Not only this, but I also did a T.A.ship for EOSC516 this past summer, in which I got to organize the course for the upcoming semester, including design a Vista site and design assignments. The course is finishing up this Friday, and I’m nervous for some of the feedback on that…but I’ll write a reflection on that later! I routinely write reflections about my facilitating successes/challenges after course sessions, so I’ll post some up on this blog soon.

Finally, I keep myself busy with EOS Grad Council, I fairly-regularly take teaching & learning professional development sessions/workshops at the Centre for Teaching and Learning Technology on campus, and I try to keep active, but fail miserably.