33 and wondering...

"what am I going to do with my life?"

Its ironic that I help student discern their calling. I could use some of that right now. Well, that is not totally true - I believe my calling places me in collegiate environments, working with college students. The question today is how does that look in preparation for graduating in 200 days?

I am currently in the process of applying for PhD programs. I am applying at a number of schools, including UCLA and USC.

I'm applying at UCLA for two reasons: 1) it is in California, and I think I'd like to be there (kind of between-ish Wa and Az), and 2) its the highest-ranked program on the West Coast (#3 nationwide). The other top two are Penn State and Univ. of Michigan.

But the more I look at UCLA, I wonder if its the program for me. I also wonder if I should go back to the earlier plan, before the reconsideration, which was to work for a couple of years before I start PhD work.

Here's the deal: I love learning. But I also love being a part of college student formation and development. Will doing PhD work make it easier or harder to transform college students? I don't know.

What are my goals once I have a PhD? I don't know.

ARGH! And now I have people helping me through this process that are totally gung ho about it... and I am unsure. Some days I am really excited about the opportunity to apply and continue in school. Other days I want to abandon it all and go back to my earlier plan of getting a job at Pepperdine and living out my days in Malibu.

And then I think - is a PhD in Education the right choice? Maybe I should be going to Seminary and getting a degree in Spiritual Formation. Maybe I should be getting a degree in Counseling Psychology.

So here I am. Confused, a little bit frustrated at myself, and not wanting to let anyone down. I think i just realized that I may have some "people pleasing" issues.

That is it for today. t-minus 35 days until applications are due at UCLA and USC. For now I'm going forward until I have more direction.

Pray for me.

New Haircut~

I forgot to mention that about a week ago I got a new haircut! I'm posting some pics here for all y'all to see. :)

Tiff

Its about time!

Well, its only been just over a week since my last post, but it feels like forever. This one may be brief as I'm trying to get ahead of my homework in preparation for "Fall Parties" this weekend.

I may have mentioned this last year, but for those of you who are new... Baylor has delayed sorority recruitment. This means that formal recruitment doesn't happen until the week before Spring semester (rather than fall semester). Its good for freshman because they are able to get familiar with the campus and make friends prior to going through formal recruitment. But to get the recruitment season started we have "Fall Parties" - two days of a sort of preview to recruitment. Every potential new member visits every "house" (which in this case is a sorority chapter room) - hears songs, meets women, and tries to see which will be the best fit. Then they go back and rank the chapters in order from 1-9. In the spring, each woman will return to 7 chapters at most.

So that is happening this weekend. 4pm on Friday until late.. and 6am on Saturday until mid-day. I'm trying to get ahead on homework this week, so that I don't suffer so much later this week!

Yesterday, while doing homework I watched the first two Lord of the Rings movies: "The Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers." Today, as I type up my answers to counseling reflection questions, I am watching "The Return of the King." I have to admit that I love these movies. After seeing the second one a number of times, I read the trilogy and it was pretty amazing (I cried at the end). But there is something about the movies that I love.

I love the heroism of Samwise Gamgee - his honest and true heart. I feel like he is the kind of Christian we are supposed to be - he is naive like a child, not understanding what he is headed toward, but suspicious of evil, he is gentle but aware. Now sometimes, he's not very nice and calls Gollum names, true, but he is as faithful a friend to Frodo as anyone could hope to have.

And I love when the Elf king, Eldred says to Aragorn, "Put aside the Ranger... become who you were born to be!" There is this point in our lives when we all have to put off who we were pretending to be when we were hiding from our true calling, and become the person we were created to be.

There is so much more than this, but perhaps the reason I need to watch these movies right now is that I'm traveling through my own journey (again) of discovery. I'm traversing dangerous paths to figure out who I am and who God is calling me to be. And frankly, sometimes I'm a little scared. I fear that I will choose wrongly. I fear that if I choose to work for a couple years that I will lose my passion to go back and get a PhD. I fear that I am choosing the wrong area for PhD study, or that I should be getting a master's in counseling at a seminary first. I fear that if I go ahead and get my PhD that I will not be able to get a job because I'll be overqualified.

Crazy isn't it? And the Lord says, "Do not fear, for I am with you." (among other things)

So I am trying to remember my passions and courage. Trying to regain my footing on this slippery and dimly lit path. And trying to let the light of Christ shine through me and others to help me as I traverse this way.

Well, that is it for my philosophical ramblings... here is what's going on this week:

Tonight - ADPi chapter meeting, and hopefully "Heroes"!

Tuesday - I'm one of three graduate students speaking at a luncheon for the division of student life. the theme is "applying theory to practice"

Thursday - After class a few of us get together to watch the Office and Gray's Anatomy. I'm looking forward to Thursday. :)

Friday and Saturday - Fall Parties

Sunday - dinner with the Weathersbees!

Goals for the week: spend at least one hour working on grad school applications. work out 4 mornings, eat more vegetables.

Blessings to you!


"The beacons are lit!" "Gondor calls for aid." "And Rohan will answer."

explaining my recent absence

Hi Friends,

Its been a rough week. Thanks to those of you who told me that the Lord has been putting me on your hearts. I was mightily encouraged.

On Tuesday of this week, my computer - which I've been having trouble with, as you know, I think - inexplicably erased the BACKED-UP files as I was transfering them to my hard drive (which had been reformatted and thus had no data). Yes, you read that correctly... the only copies of files like music and pictures were erased. (please understand that I had a backup... it was this backup which was erased)

I was mightily discouraged but trying to trust the Lord that there might be a way (because I called the IT office and they said they might be able to recover some of it). The next morning as I was reading scripture I felt like Matthew 6:8 was especially appropriate for me. "for your Father knows what you need before you ask him." That was good, because I was so discouraged. I decided to just be optimistic in my trust for the data recovery, and deeper, to trust that God knew what I needed more than me -and maybe that data had become an idol for me.

Yesterday, the IT desk called and said that they had recovered the data. My phone was dead and I didn't get the message until after my night class, so I don't know the details yet, but I'm guardedly hopeful at this point.

Between this computer issue and a take-home mid-term that caused me to cancel a planned trip to San Antonio, not to mention my need for extra time to get stuff together to apply for doctoral programs, and time to continue to seek God about that course of action, I have felt alternately discouraged, disappointed,crushed, overwhelmed and angry. In the meantime, I still see God being faithful to me through all this, which humbles me and brings me deep joy.

Be blessed today!

My life in 10 minute blurbs.

Today I'm working on completing an annotated bibliography for my counseling class. For those of you don't know what that means - have no fear. I just recently learned and will 'splain.

An Annotated Bib (as we've come to call it) is a document that has a reference for an article and then a brief summary of the article's contents (between 100 words and a page-ish - no longer than a page). The purpose is for research, as an individual is doing research on a topic and reading articles, they put the reference and summary down so that they can easily find articles they are looking for later when writing a dissertation, literature review, article, etc.

Mine is on depression and I've found some really interesting articles about counseling and psychotherapy and depression! Nerdy, but true.

So all that to say that we have to have 10 articles annotated and turned in by class tonight. And also the reading reflection questions (due at noon). My reading reflection is done, I just need to look it over one more time and make sure its coherent (no guarantee!). But I am still four articles away from being done with the Bib. I have to read them and then write the summary.

After I read and summarize one article, then I get to have a 10 minute break (woo hoo!), during which I will update this blog, and when that's done, read through my questions.

I'm going to change color every time I have had to go away and come back!

What is up with me, you ask?

1) School is crazy right now. I'm liking my classes, but there is just a lot of work for them. A lot. I'm surviving barely, but Sarah and I are doing homework seemingly non-stop (with a couple breaks I will share about here).

2) Last week, in a huge bad-decision moment, I decided to put Windows Vista on my computer. My computer is 4 years old, and not really Vista compatible it turns out. I thought I was putting on Vista "home basic" - but turns out I was putting on "ultimate" - yeah, really not capable of running that kind of technology. Its still working, but a little slower than normal. However, some of the stuff I normally use was not working and then it shut down my computer, and I ended up having to take it into the shop at school. They told me they would try to fix it and it would cost $43.
I didn't have a computer for the entire weekend - the one week when I had three different written projects due. nice.
Thankfully, Sarah had a work laptop I was able to use and the library checks out laptops for four hours, too. We were at the library for a long time. I lost track of time and turned my computer in 13 minutes late. $10 fee. suck!
The shop called on Monday saying my computer's recovery partition (we were just going to run that and reload Windows XP) was corrupt and I could call HP and get recovery disks for $20-30. (you can imagine my glee, since at this point I was ringing up appx $100 in stuff to fix this mistake!)
I asked if instead I could just buy XP at the bookstore and reinstall it. He said yes, and I called the bookstore. I was able to get a copy of XP for $5 (saving $25 vs. the other HP plan) and when I picked up my computer... they hadn't charged me, because they couldn't do anything! woohoo!
* Price tag back down to $15 (plus emotional grief...)
So I hooked up my computer when I should have been doing homework, and tried to load XP. But the bookstore sold me XP professional, which is a 64-bit software and my computer is an x86 (which is somehow different, I don't really get it but I get it enough to understand it won't work).
So sad news... I had to go to the HP website and order the recovery disks.
* Price tag at $45.
Meanwhile, when I installed Vista it made me uninstall my antivirus software... and so then I had to re-order antivirus software.
* Price tag at $70 (total).
And now, I have the recovery disks, but I'm forcing myself to wait until tomorrow night (friday night?...nerdy!) or sometime this weekend to put the disks through and reformat my computer. The downside? I may have to wipe my entire computer clean in the process... it looks like there is a way to load it with out doing that, but I'm not feeling super positive at this point. Thankfully, before I put on Vista I bought an external hard drive and backed up my entire computer, so if I do have to wipe it, I think I have all my files....
* Price tag $170.
That doesn't even include the actual COST of Vista. Price tag $185. What was I thinking!?

But really, I needed the backup drive anyway, my computer is getting old and its for the best that I have a backup, so lets just call it $85 and be done with it. Unless I can't get it to work and have to take it back to the shop. But for now, I'll be positive and say, "I'm sure it will all be OK."

On the bright side, my car insurance went down $10 a month, so I have an extra $120 this year, which just about covers my computer mania.

3) I am going to be speaking at our next Student Life staff development lunch. Two of my fellow students and I are going to speak about putting theory that we are learning in our program into practice. We have about 10 minutes each. I'm excited, but nervous. I also wonder how I can make this a good practice experience for my PhD interviews. I think I have a lot of ways that my theory has informed what I do for my work at Baylor (and in the future) but we'll see how it goes! Its a great honor, though, and I'm really blessed to have been asked!

4) I just spent part of my 10 minute break surfing facebook. I'm sorry. I'll be right back. :)

I am only one article away from being able to take shower. amazing.
OK, life update continued!

5) I think I mentioned that I am in a debate with myself right now about my future. Am I going to work full-time after graduation? Am I going to start a PhD program full-time? yikes. I have to make these decisions relatively soon, because the PhD deadlines are in early december and I have some work to do to get ready (re-proofing papers, etc). I really like the idea of going straight into school again, just to get it done. I like the idea of working toward a doctorate - its kind of crazy, but I feel like there are a lot of areas in which I could do research and be really excited about it. But there is some debate amongst the people I've spoken to about how my experience will help me get a job. Some say I have enough experience and get the degree. Others say that perhaps I should work FT for a year and then start PhD work part-time, so that I can bulk up my resume.

In the meantime, I just don't know. I'm praying, and seeking wisdom from God, and also from man. My last meeting with Baylor people about this is on Friday, after that, I'm going to have to really seek to hear God speak and direct me in a path!

I'm not done updating, probably, but this is long and so I'll say Goodbye for now. And next week I'll have more updating. :)

Blessings on you!!!