Good Stuff!

GRE Word of the Day:
erudite (adj)--having or showing great knowledge in learning

True story, I just picked that word out of a list from my study book, not knowing the definition. And I have to say, it is quite appropriate for studying!

Oh, there is lots of good stuff going on right now!

FIRST: I have a meeting with Dr. Alejandro Acevedo from Western Washington on November 1st! He received my information that I sent him last Friday, and he responded saying that my application is not as strong as others, but he liked my ideas for research projects! That's really exciting. So between now and then I will be reading some of his articles of recent research, and I will be spending time articulating what exactly I would like to research so that this meeting can go well. Yay for Bellingham!

SECOND: My Saturday night adventure at the Killer Whale Tales fundraiser was amazing. I got to meet the director, Jeff Hogan, who is just awesome. He is incredibly nice, remembered my name every time he saw me, and introduced me to two current graduate students at the University of Washington. Also, thanks to my amazing parents, I get to have a meeting with him. This fundraiser was an auction, so they bought me one of the items, which was to pick out one of Jeff's pictures for him to professionally print for me. He has a library of about 27,000 pictures! Plus, I get to pick his brain about how to get plugged into the killer whale world (for lack of a better term) and how to get into a career that I would actually want to do.

Ideally, my career path would lead me to an organization like Killer Whale Tales. I would love to work as a naturalist and educator, teaching people about whales, the Pacific Northwest ecology, and conservation. I think I like this idea best because I would still get to be a semi-student, keeping up with all of the latest research, but I also get to interact with people.

THIRD: I am now looking into the School of Marine Affairs at University of Washington. The two ladies I talked to at the KWT fundraiser were students through that program and both of them really like it, so I'm considering this as an option as well.

One of the most important things that I've learned, which was always lingering in the back of my mind, is that volunteer experience is probably going to be the deciding factor in getting into a program I want. This won't necessarily be because I need volunteer experience as a pre-requisite to admission, but because volunteering will establish the contacts and networking web that I need. This means that if I don't get into grad school this year, I will probably still quit Concordia and move up north to Seattle or Bellingham. I will probably end up working some place like Starbucks (ahem, Tara, that would be great!) where I could make enough money to pay rent, but focus a lot of my free time in volunteering.

Decisions to be made later! For now, back to studying GRE words.