Happy New Year everyone!

I am currently sitting at my desk which is covered in plants, a family pictures calendar, countless paper(s) to my right, and wet socks on my left. Oh, and one stress “ball” that looks like a brown bear, which I have just named Beary (for the sake of this blog). I’m also bopping my head around to the sound of the ska tunes that defined my high school years.

In the past few weeks, I’ve identified an academic focusing problem. What I do is put a lot of time and energy into planning what’s next and how to get there and thinking all too often about what I really really really want to do next! Then I look around and realize my thesis is yet to be completed and my plants need watering. I am thinking about the future and planning for it, but have not been as passionate about the present for a while now.

As I said, I recognized this in the past month or so, but as I sit at this lively desk, I have just realized that I also have this problem in the personal aspect of my life.

This morning, I read a friend’s blog in which she discussed how she does not believe in New Year’s Resolutions because any time is a good time to change your life. I totally agree. However, she wrote something right after this that totally struck me. She asked why do people plan to do things on January first and ignore their lives in the present until the next January first rolls around? Do it now. Live your life!

After reading this wise statement, guilt crept in: I have recently been daydreaming about the next steps in my relationships (and I’ll admit it, I bookmarked a baby blanket knitting pattern or two), figuring out where I will live when I live in the “real house of my adult life” and how fun it will be etc., etc.

Wait a second – I live in a wonderful apartment. With my partner. In an amazing city. Let’s pull the daydream reigns in…what’s wrong with right now?

Nothing. It is now my goal, my “new year’s resolution” if you will, to not make “new year’s resolutions”. Live in the present, not in the future. I’ll keep planning, but I’ll focus and enjoy right now to the fullest instead.

There are a lot of things I think of as I say/write/type “pushing forward”. It stimulates reflection on the past, and visions of the (immediate) future.

I spent this past Wednesday at the Aquarium, volunteering for the school program I am involved with. Due  to a busy semester and a bit of re-prioritization (I gotta graduate sometime!) it was only my 3rd time doing the program in about 10-12 weeks of programming. All day I was very aware of the stark contrast between my experiences on Wednesday and this time last year. One year ago (1-2 months into this weekly volunteering job) I was terrified to take a small group of students and lead them on my own. Each week I would hope to team-teach or shadow someone because I just didn’t feel comfortable. On Wednesday I was team-teaching, and found it very challenging. It’s interesting how your attitude can completely change once experience or “expertliness” is added to the equation. Now that I feel comfortable teaching the program, it’s more challenging to share the dissemination of knowledge with a partner.

Could it be that I’m already an old curmudgeon at this program? If that’s true, I think my fellow volunteers are guilty of this as well. More likely, I felt uncomfortable because I’ve rarely been around this term or because we didn’t discuss our approach very much before jumping in. My approach was to let the newer volunteers do their thing and hold out on the urge to add or (on one or two occasions) correct. I found that sometimes, when I would chime in with a new idea or comment, I would meet some resistance from my partner. It was very interesting. I remember well being nervous of leading, and now it seems I wanted more talk time. At some point in the last year, I pushed through the comfort zone of fading into the background.

Beyond my volunteering experiences, “pushing forward” also makes me think of my recent teaching opportunity – the one in which I gave a 50-minute lecture to 200 undergraduates. I had discussed the possibility of teaching with one of the Instructors a month before, and we had decided to revisit the idea next semester. Lo and behold, an opportunity arose out of the blue, and I had only a week and a half to prepare (though really, what would I have done with more time?). I decided I simply had to dive in and just get ‘er done. It was scary, but it was time to take the next step. And I received such positive feedback as a reward.

Finally, I think of “pushing forward” through the next thesis hump which is to: start writing and continue?/finish up experimenting and analyzing. I’m currently frustrated with an important data set I feel like I can’t resolve without another huge push, and I want to start writing but get overwhelmed. I feel like in order to write more than I’ve got, I have to read, and I am afraid of reading.

So all in all, I this thesis data/writing push is what’s next/now on my agenda; hopefully I can draw from my previous push-throughs as inspiration. I’ll let you know how it goes….

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.