A Good Start

My first full week of graduate school was not bad at all, in fact it was good.

Anyone that has ever worked with me knows I love those human resource group activities where the whole engineering department maps out their personalities, work styles or some other profile on a grid. It gave me a much better understanding of my non-verbal co-workers. Usually management got everyone to do these "team building exercises" just as the working group was about to implode from stress. In the engineering world I mapped out on these grids as an anomaly, the statistical flyer in the data average. Explaining why relative strangers would say to me when I told them what I did for work: "Really? You don't seem like an engineer." Happily, not so in the PT-student world!

While I am the ripest tomato in the box, I am not the only tomato in the box! As a class of 26 we mapped our learning styles. There are four styles: Doing, Experiencing, Thinking and Reflecting. We all use these four styles at some time in our learning process but, we tend to rely more heavily on one style over the other three. I map into the "Doing" category (I know, I know this is completely shocking) and so do 7 other people! Heh-heh, I am not an asymptotic statistical data point in the PT population.

The best part of this teambuilding exercise was that we presented our learning style to the rest of the class. In 15 minutes, the "Doers" (that's my group!) put together a power point presentation and two skits. I love my creative, risk-taking, doer group!

So in my first week I did a team building exercise straight up and I realized I am not the statistical odd ball in the group - pretty darn good first week.

First Impressions

I worked in a competitive high paced corporate job for 15 years before I decided to return to school. The corporate environment was very structured, organized and plain - like a prison. The last company I worked for had crazy sayings to motivate employees such as: "stress is a good thing", "there are no second priorities" and "only the paranoid survive" .

Today, the first day of school, the program director told us that we are not in competition with each other and that we should each make an effort to help each other succeed. We are told that stress is deleterious to our health so we need to make time to have some regular fun. In addition, one of my professors said he felt like the new PT classroom was too drab and we might be uninspired by our surroundings. He would like for us to come up with decorating ideas for our new classroom so that we feel inspired in the classroom.

I feel like I landed in just the right spot.

Pre-flight checklist

I am a planner. I like to make plans, review plans, stick-to-the-plan and execute the plan.

I have been planning an adventure of sorts since the summer of 2007 when I was a miserable semiconductor engineer working for the even more miserable Intel corporation. The adventure starts with PT School on Monday, August 24, 2009.

However, I really needed to get my life in order so that I could spend three years in school. Thus the pre-flight checklist included making sure both of my kids (Stephen & Emily) will be out of high school and enrolled in college. And, that I had enough space between my semiconductor career and new PT career that I didn't feel burnt out and unable to focus. So I quit my very lucrative engineering career on Leap Day 2008 (auspicious and unplanned!) and spent the last 18 months enjoying time with my teenage children, teaching yoga and traveling a little bit. I took the family to Paris, I taught an yoga and ayurveda workshop in Sweden, I spent 10 days checking out Hawaii as a place to do PT clinicals and I organized my garage.

Right now at 49.5 years of age I am ready to launch myself into this new career, this whole new life. I am so looking forward to the adventure.