Registered

For some reason registration for next semester began at 10:00 pm tonight.  The system was a little slow, presumably because of overcrowding by people anxious to get into their preferred classes before they filled up, but I got into mine with no trouble.  So that was nice.

Feeling Good

I don’t know what it is exactly that has caused such a change in my mood, but I’m feeling a lot better than I did just a week ago.  I’m really busy with school, which I guess takes my mind off of other things a bit, and while I don’t know if I’ll get that job I applied for, just having gotten an interview is a big step up from where I was before.  I also stopped drinking after my license expired; I don’t expect this to be a permanent thing, but it’s certainly enhanced my productivity a lot.  I wasn’t drinking all that much, but it was enough to keep me from getting as much work done as I need to right now, and it was probably having some effects on my mood as well.  Anyway, I’m feeling good now, which is nice.

More Conference

I went to two panels at the conference today.  The first was on career advice for young planners.  Not a lot of good news, but it was interesting to hear a variety of perspectives.  I’m still not really sure if I want to go into public-sector or private-sector planning.  Most jobs are in the public sector, primarily with local governments but also at the state and federal level and with various regional-level organizations.  Those jobs tend to be pretty stable and have good benefits, which is certainly something that appeals to me.  I think in some ways I’m a born bureaucrat.  Private sector planning, on the other hand, is mainly consulting, and it pays better than government work but also involves a lot more risk and longer hours.  The flexibility of that sounds kind of nice, but I’m pretty risk averse.  So I don’t know.  Luckily I’ve got plenty of time to find out, and if the economy doesn’t improve much by the time I get out of school I’m not likely to have much choice in the matter of where I work or what I do.

The second panel was on railroad right-of-ways and the importance of keeping them preserved now that rail is becoming more popular for both passenger and freight transportation.  New Jersey is full of these inactive right-of-ways, and they’ve begun to be encroached on by development or even converted to other uses, which in a state this dense will make it virtually impossible to add additional rail capacity in some areas.  The presenters had some interesting things to say about the very successful light rail line in Hudson County and the importance of freight rail access to industrial development, and they made a good case for why preserving the right-of-ways is crucial for any of this to happen.

The keynote speaker was a guy who’s just written a book about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.  He talked about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.

Conference

Unlike many of the state chapters of the American Planning Association, which move their annual meetings to different locations around the state from year to year, the New Jersey chapter always holds its annual conference in the same location: the New Brunswick Hyatt.  The Bloustein school, which is the only planning school in the state, has close ties to the state APA chapter, and cooperates closely on organizing the conference.  Part of this is that Bloustein grad students volunteer to staff the conference and as a result get free admission, which is a really good deal because the conference is quite expensive.

That’s all a buildup to the fact that I volunteered to help staff the conference this year.  I helped with the initial setting up this afternoon and staffed the registration table for a while.  I was kind of nervous about doing it, but I’m glad I did.  I got to know some of my fellow students better, met a lot of people attending the conference (though only briefly, as I checked them in), and generally began to ease my way into this social and professional network.  There were some panels today, which I couldn’t go to because I was working the desk, but I’m not scheduled to do anything tomorrow so I’m going to go to some of the panels instead.  It should be interesting.

Serendipity

One of the nice things about the way my school works is that a lot of the jobs for graduate students are grant-funded positions working on specific projects, which means they can come available at any time.  One such position appeared on the school mailing list today.  I applied for it, and the person I sent my resume to wrote me back saying I had excellent credentials and asking when I could meet.  So it sounds like I have a pretty good shot at getting a job now, after despairing about my inability to get one just a few days ago.

So, Corzine

Really not such a popular guy, it seems.

License Acquired!

Pretty easily, too.  It turned out that the fact that my previous license had expired didn’t matter at all.  It only took about an hour, and I didn’t have to take the test.

So now that’s out of the way, which is a big relief.

Outrage

On a less emo note, one thing I’ve been struck by in my classes is the wide variety of attitudes people seem to have to the things we’re studying.  A lot of people seem to go into a program like this to change the world, and they have a really gung-ho attitude about it that involves a lot of outrage at injustices they want to fix.  Which is fine, of course, and it’s good that there are people trying to fix these things.  These people seem to mainly focus on things like housing, community development, environmental justice, etc.  That is, issues having to do with poor people and their lack of equal access to various things.  It takes a lot of outrage and motivation to devote oneself to these things, because they’re really hard to change, and it sounds like the classes on them spend a lot of time hammering that message in.  This seems to discourage some people, but for others it probably just serves to reinforce their outrage and dedication.

This isn’t me at all, though.  I’m not here to save the world.  I’m not particularly interested in the really difficult social-justice problems that a lot of people are passionate about.  I’ve been tending more in the direction of environmental planning, and also more in the direction of analysis rather than policy-formation (which is another story I’ll cover in another post).  I’m here to learn about stuff that interests me, and hopefully get a job doing something interesting and useful.  I guess I just don’t have much of an “activist” mindset.

I’m sure I’m not the only person like this here, but the activists tend to be loud and to draw a lot of attention to themselves, so it sometimes seems like they dominate everything.  Which isn’t really a problem, but it’s interesting to see how very different some people’s reasons for coming to a school like this are from mine.

Down

I don’t know why I’ve been having such a hard time lately.  School has been fine, but it feels like I can’t handle anything else I have to do.  I did finally get my insurance card, which meant I could finally refill my antidepressant prescription.  Probably my current depressive state is due to the weeks I spent without the pills while I was waiting for the card, and while I’ve now started taking them again, I know it’ll be a little while before the full effect kicks in.

Still, though, it seems like I can’t get any major things done.  The latest crisis was precipitated by finding out that my driver’s license expired a couple days ago.  This doesn’t have much direct effect on my life, since I don’t drive and I rarely get carded when I buy alcohol, but it was just a shock and a reminder that I’d been meaning to go to the DMV and get a NJ license for residency purposes for months now but never got around to it.  So now I’m just going to go over there on Monday with as much paperwork as I can gather and hope they’ll accept an expired out-of-state license as a valid form of ID.

This isn’t a big deal, but it just highlights for me how little progress I’ve made on these life-outside-of-school things.  Unlike in past school experiences, I have been able to develop a reasonable social life for myself, so that’s a plus, but otherwise I’m really struggling.

The main thing is that I really need to find a job.  I have plenty of money to live on for now, but it definitely won’t last any longer than the end of this semester, and ideally I’d like to get some source of income set up before then.

It’s not that there’s any shortage of jobs, as far as I can tell.  My school has all these research centers that hire graduate students, and I applied for a couple of positions that were advertised early in the semester and didn’t get them.  Okay, fair enough.  I think it’s particularly competitive to get these positions this year, since the bad economy has resulted in so many more people going to grad school.  My cohort is the biggest anyone at the school can remember, apparently.  Also because of the economy, a lot of these people have relevant undergraduate degrees and/or years of relevant experience, which makes them obviously better choices for these jobs than someone like me.  I could definitely do the work for most of these positions, but there’s nothing in my resume that makes me look particularly qualified.  So it’s not really surprising that I didn’t get any of the advertised positions.

There were only a few of them, though, and it seems like most people actually get these jobs by making connections with the professors who run the centers (or something).  This puts me at a serious disadvantage, because while the professors teaching my classes seem pretty impressed with me, they also don’t seem to have the right connections to any of these centers to help me out with this.  (I haven’t actually talked to any of them about this; it’s just the impression I get.)

Obviously the solution is to reach out to the professors who do run these centers, and I know that’s what I need to do.  For whatever reason, though, I just can’t bring myself to do that.  I’ve been having a really hard time feeling like I belong at the school.  In class I’ve been able to adjust pretty well, but it took me weeks to be comfortable going to the student lounge or the computer lab.  I feel like I’ve somehow lost all of my self-confidence, and my shyness and self-consciousness has taken over completely.  I know I need to snap out of it, but I just can’t.

I guess I just didn’t realize how much I was going to have to advocate for myself here.  I’m not generally happy to accept help or guidance, but I feel like I need some right now.  I guess I was expecting the school to be offering me tons of guidance and that I would be resisting that, but instead the school isn’t pushing any help on me.  I know I can get guidance on all of this if I seek it out, but that’s exactly what I feel totally incapable of doing right now.

I just wish someone would show some interest in me and, like, ask me how I’m doing or something.  I feel like I don’t have anyone to talk to about any of this, which I guess is why I’m now pouring my heart out to the internet.

The thing is, though, that it’s clearly just my lack of initiative that’s standing in my way here.  I guess (and I’m kind of working through this as I write, so it may not all make sense) I feel uncomfortable being a student again, not in that I don’t like going to class or doing homework, but in that I don’t like being in that sort of low-ranking position within the school after working in an atmosphere where I was treated as an equal by pretty much everyone.  I’m really reluctant to overstep any hidden boundaries to what is considered appropriate behavior for students, but I don’t know what those boundaries are, so I just don’t do anything and avoid everyone.

The thing is, I know that if I could just put myself out there somehow, people would recognize that I do belong here and that I do have talents that are valued.  The problem is that none of those talents can really come through without me really trying to sell myself, which is not something I’m comfortable doing.  I don’t want to be a supplicant.  I guess I sort of got used to people coming to me, and I’m having a hard time adjusting to a situation where I have to go to them.

Several times in recent social situations people have asked me questions about things that I happen to know a lot about, and when I answered they seemed really impressed with both my depth of knowledge and my ability to present it.  I feel like those are the skills I have that I’ve really developed recently and that I have to offer.  They’re not the only skills I have, but they’re the ones I have that are easiest to show.  I don’t know how many of the possible jobs out there would really utilize these skills, but I’m sure there are some.

I feel like I’m surrounded by all these go-getters who are really ambitious and motivated.  They have all this relevant background and experience and they’re here to save the world.  Many of them, especially those from New Jersey, are also very loud and pushy in a way peculiar to a certain type of person from New Jersey.  I can’t compete with that.  I’m quiet and shy and skeptical about a lot of this “save the world” stuff.  I’m sure I’ll be able to find my niche here at some point, but it’s turning out to be a lot harder than I was expecting.

I’m not really asking for advice here.  This post is long and rambling, and I’ve mostly been writing it because I feel like I need to get some of this stuff out and this is the easiest place to do it.  I do feel a little better after writing it, so there’s that.

Done!

I had my first midterm today.  It was pretty easy.  It also brought me back to a situation I’ve been in a lot when it comes to test-taking.

I not only test well, which seems to be pretty common among my internet acquaintances, but I also test fast.  I’m almost always the first person done with a test, sometimes by a considerable margin.  Since I’m also shy and self-conscious, this usually means I end up sitting there with my completed test until someone else finishes and hands theirs in, which tends to embolden me to turn mine in too and get the hell out of the room.  Today I finished the test, which had a three-hour period set aside for it, in about an hour, and then waited about half an hour until a couple other people had turned theirs in before I turned in mine.  My roommate, who is also in the class, later told me that most of the remaining people turned theirs in shortly afterward, so I may not have been the only person doing this.

I do tend to get good grades on these tests, but even when I don’t do particularly well I finish quickly (sometimes I just don’t know the answer to a question, and there’s no use agonizing over it).  I often wonder, though, just what all the other people in these tests are doing for so long.  Am I really that unusual in finishing so quickly?  I emphasize that it’s not that I’m particularly well-prepared or anything.  This seems to happen regardless of how well I’ve studied or how well  I know the material.