MAlaise

It's the time of year when people start asking "how much longer do you have to go before finishing grad school?" My answer is: one Summer class, one Fall class, and my graduate project. This summer I'm taking a popular Ecclesiology class with a popular professor, and it had better be good, because I have to get to school by 8:30 AM... AM!!... every day for two weeks. It'll be my only Summer class in my grad school experience, and everyone says that they're wonderful- "like retreats!!!" so hopefully it'll be worth the drive through Boston traffic. I think to beat it, I'll have to leave my house by around 4:30AM. That's only a slight exaggeration.
In the fall I will take an ethics course, unless somehow I can get out of it, which sounds wrong. But I'd MUCH rather take a course being offered that focuses on the Initiation Sacraments, and I already squandered my electives on other classes.
My project is about Confirmation, the sacrament of, and trying to pull together some theology of said sacrament with the practices that parishes use to prepare adolescents for it. I've already done a buncha work on this, as my internship this year, so I hope to attack that and get it done by the end of the Fall semester, and then I'll be done.
Grad school has been an on-the-whole positive experience but I am ambivalent about whether it's been really worthwhile, or if I'm a lot better off having (almost) gone through it. I'll be glad to have a Master's Degree, and I definitely have learned and grown, but I also am so looking forward to having my life back. Before I started school, if people asked me about going to grad school I would say "I would like to have gone to grad school, a lot more than I would like to go" and I guess that's still true.
Maybe it's just senioritis, or the rain. Either way, I can see a light at the end of this educational tunnel, and that's a good thing!
(image credit)