Back to the Grind...

And just like that, spring semester has started and it's back to the grind of grad school.  The first week of the semester is behind me now and it was definitely a better start than my first week of fall semester was.

Mentally I was not ready to start back and I was dreading it.  It’s not that I wasn’t excited about my classes, I enjoyed the break and it was so nice to relax and not have a full schedule of work and classes.

This semester, I will be taking Sports Communication, Social Media Strategies & Tactics and my capstone project class.  In the fall, I had A LOT of reading for my classes each week.  However, this semester in my two electives, there is some reading, but there are more small writing assignments and projects instead.  And that is okay with me!  I would much rather apply what I’m learning than just reading about concepts and ideas.

I will also be working on my capstone project throughout this semester.  For this research project, I will look at how Major League Baseball teams use social media to build their brand and engage with their fans.  I started the foundations of this project last semester, so it is nice to have a chunk of the paper already written.  That will definitely make my life a little bit easier!

This semester, my classes are all in the evening as opposed to being during the day and after the first week, I am not sure that I like having evening classes all that much.  It just messes with my normal routine.  I am used to having class during the day and then getting homework done in the evening.  I think it’s just going to take a few weeks to get used to this schedule and get into a routine.

My graduate assistantship will also be different (for the most part) this semester.  After working as a teaching assistant in the fall, I will be working in the Marketing & Communications office for the School of Communications this semester.  My main project will be writing content for the school’s website, which will mostly be alumni profiles and Q&A’s. 

I will also be sitting in on one class per week for the same professor that I was a teaching assistant for in the fall.  It is the same class that I was a TA for, so I am already familiar with the content taught and the class setup.  This will make for a nice mix of responsibilities for this semester, but without the stress of being a full-time teaching assistant like I was in the fall.