Personal Update

I've been in Madison for a week now. Classes haven't yet started, but I have already been to an orientation and other department events, and I also received my first check from the department. Getting paid to take classes this semester sounds great, but I also have to put some significant effort into finding an academic advisor. I don't know yet what I will be studying, but during the first three days this week I will be attending presentations from each faculty member about their research projects. After that, I will make appointments with the ones who have research that interests me and learn more about their research and their styles as advisors. Then I get to give my top three choices and hope for the best.

So this is how I get to pick the advisor I will work under and the field I will study for the next five years. It seems a lot more dramatic when written like that. Prof Abbott here gave some good advice for those of us who had worries about landing in the "wrong" place for our time here. He said that those people who are successful and well known appear to have one thing in common. It isn't that they all stumbled into the right, cutting-edge, sexy frontier (though that probably helped many of them). Prof Abbott said that the successful people have in common is that they took the work they had and did very well with it. I think I believe him, if only because his advice matches with my life so far. I came to Mines as a inconspicuous student who hadn't taken any AP courses or done anything fancy like that. While some of the people around me were taking physics II, I was reviewing precalculus and writing fractions like 3 and 1/7 because I was always told that writing 22/7 was "improper."

I'm pretty marginal starting out as a student here, too. I still feel very lucky that I even got in here. So many of the things that they are doing here in the chemical engineering department still make my head spin on a regular basis. I'm often in rooms with half a dozen professors who have papers that have been cited a few hundred times. If I am to be granted a PhD by the members of this department, then I will have to prove in my five years here that I am capable of producing work on their level. I have some work to do. I have heard so many stories from my "peers" of the work they have already done during their undergraduate work, and I feel behind before the gun has even gone off.

Yet I know that somehow I can do it, and that I will do well at it. My time at Mines transformed me into something completely different than the person I was when I first set foot in Golden, and I believe that something even better will happen here. I sacrificed so much to come here, and I will not let that sacrifice be in vain, especially not because of my fears of failure and the unknown. I have seen again and again that my own physical and mental limitations are no limits at all. Nothing on earth will stop me, and only heaven can get in my way, if it is revealed that I was gravely mistaken and that it was not in the Creator's plan for me to be here in this time. I believe, as I was told before I left for here, that there is something big ahead for me.