Grad School Kristin, Seminary Kristin

 Over the past few weeks, as I've been returning to school, I've been reflecting on the differences between grad school Kristin who was earning an MA and then a PhD in English between 1987 and 1992 and seminary Kristin who is earning an MDiv and already thinking about a DMin after that.  Let me make a record:

--Seminary Kristin is more confident in her writing.  I've been writing a lot longer than grad school Kristin.  Unlike many people, I got the PhD and then spent the next 30 years writing in a variety of genres.  But getting the PhD also gave me confidence in both my writing, my navigating a committee skills, and in myself as a person who could make her ambitious goals come to fruition.

--Seminary Kristin has a lot more on her plate:  I'm teaching more classes in addition to my full-time administrator job and my seminary classes.  But at this point, I'm less stressed than grad school Kristin.

--Perhaps I'm less stressed because I have more money.  In grad school, summers were especially rough because my assistantship was only for the school year.  Last week I was in the Fresh Market, which was one of my favorite stores when I was in grad school.  In grad school, I could hardly afford anything in that store.  A week ago, I thought, I could buy anything I wanted; I wish more would leap out at me.

--Seminary Kristin has computer resources that thrill grad school Kristin.  But we're both using the computer as a fancy typewriter more than anything else.

--Grad school Kristin waited until the last possible minute to turn her work in.  I am now training myself to do the smaller tasks and post them as I finish them.  Yesterday I finished a discussion post for my online class and I thought about waiting until it was closer to the Saturday deadline.  But I had already polished it, and I knew that in the days to come, I wasn't likely to make it significantly better than the draft before me.

--Of course grad school Kristin really only had one large paper per class, usually 20 pages.  In seminary, taking online classes, I have a wide variety of assignments and so far, most of them are much shorter than my usual word count.  Teaching myself to scale back is different than when I was in grad school, where I often had about 7-10 pages of something to say, and I had to learn how to develop those ideas to meet the requirements.  I often added more outside sources instead of developing my own ideas.  I didn't trust my own ideas in grad school thirty years ago.  I worry that Seminary Kristin might trust her own ideas too much and not be open to new ideas.  I'm hopeful that by articulating the danger, I can avoid it.

--Thirty years!  Can it really be 30 years since I got my PhD in 1992?  Wow.

--I'm still with the same partner, but we're not doing fun, cheap stuff like going to the zoo or going to movies.  Maybe that will change when we finish all the work that has to happen before the house goes on the market.

--Grad school Kristin moved to an apartment closer to campus and closer to 5 Points, a cool part of town that had festivals and a Gourmet Shoppe and the Joyful Alternative, a cool store that stocked items like interesting clothes and a variety of tarot decks.  Grad school Kristin had a mixed record of taking advantage of all the interesting stuff happening.  Like grad school Kristin, seminary Kristin has also moved to a condo closer to downtown.  I am hopeful that we'll do more, but I also realize that we have less time, with all the other stuff we're doing.  This week, my spouse just accepted another handful of adjunct classes to teach. 

--Both grad school Kristin and seminary Kristin share the same set of emotions:  happy to see plans coming together, fretful that it's too late, but hopeful that it's not.