Pre-Dinner Meeting

I quickly met with Dr. Lewis right after my 804 class today. As always, she made a little bit of time for me and offered me an encouraging solution. Dr. Lewis told me that she and Clayton had identified a portion of a lecture that they were wanting me to teach and had identified literature for me to read in order to prepare. I will get the needed literature from Dr. Lewis hopefully next week.

Dr. Lewis said that the portion I am doing is the portion that Clayton had done when she was just starting out, so that's another good sign. It appears that I am being allowed to follow a path that has already been traveled.

When we meet next week, Dr. Lewis is also going to take the opportunity to get me some training on using the equipment used to record the lectures. She insisted that it's incredibly frustrating to think you have your lecture recorded and then realize, wait, what? No!

I am thankful for another fruitful interaction with Dr. Lewis. I am seeing I am going to need quite a bit of faculty guidance; I will not survive this educational endeavor if I am simply left to my own devices. Don't get me wrong, I am a self-starter, but I still don't have an thorough enough understanding of the details of exactly what to do in academia to do this without a bit of handholding right now (not just the publish or perish concept, but publish what, collect data how, go to what journals, follow what time tables, etc).

This makes me recall my first days as a newspaper reporter. The newspaper I was at offered virtually no training or guidance on being a newsman whatsoever, they just told me to go report. And I was like, ok, where do I start. I had to learn how to find stories and follow beats all by myself. Once I learned, I wound up being one of their best reporters, but it was one struggle of a learning process for sure and those growing pains were not pleasant (as pain never is, unless you're into that sort of thing). I am hoping here that what I am experiencing are growing pains, and that once I get adjusted to this environment, I will excel and hold my own with the rest of my cohort.