One Down One To Go

Although this picture has no relation to this post - I'm putting it in because it shows how I feel right now. Very happy. Well I've now officially completed all of my school work for my first semester! It was a lot of work between 5 essays and an exam all within the period of eight weeks - with 3 over the Christmas holiday - not very fun! Well its over now, I'm happy and my family is happy too given all the attention these essays took from them as well. Thanks to Phil he held down the fort so well, as he always does.

So you may be wondering what is in store for my next semester. Well the classes I'm most looking forward to are coming up now. This includes a course on frontal lobe functioning, clinical neuropsychology, and current topics in psychological research. The neuropsychology course is being taught by my dissertation supervisor ... it's interactive and intersting so I'm very happy. I also have to take some other mandatory classes - one on professional skills (e.g. presentation, essay writing) and the one I'm dreading the most is "Advanced Statistics Using R". R is a free statistical program, however, it requires learning the R programming language. I personally like the point and click method of SPSS (another stats package), but R is supposed to have a lot more versatility and functioning so in the long run I'm sure it will be a good thing. The only fun thing is that I can make up my own names for the functions I design so I'm planning to have a little (well a lot) of fun with that.

The good thing is that I will be finished all of my courses in March and my essays by the end of April. Unfortunately there'll be a lot of essays again in a short period of time. After I'm done the rest of the time will be devoted to my dissertation which is in the area of verbal fluency in motor neuron disease (e.g. ALS) - that will is due by August 22 and then I'll be all finished!

Well, I'm very happy in my courses and I am learning soooo much. I've done well in my grades so far, but I've only got 2 essays back so I'm crossing my fingers that I'll keep it up.