Adjusting and loving it!

Yesterday I attended the graduate orientation for the Anthropology department. Takeshi, as well as Dr. Kuhn, had indicated back in January that they were shrinking the number of students they would be accepting in order to increase the funding for each student. So, when I walked into the room I expected that we would be a small cohort--I didn't realize however just how small we would be. All in all, there are 10 new anthropology students...three, including myself, are archaeology students. Funny enough, we're also all women as well--no new male archaeologists. Good thing I guess that I already have a male archaeologist in mind...heh. At least we aren't in any danger of committing cohort-cest, as they call it.

Well, the orientation itself was interesting and fairly informative. I made myself ask questions and get my voice out there. After the orientation we headed up to the student lounge for lunch, where I re-met my mentor (I had no idea at the time when I originally emailed her and introduced myself, but we had actually met before at Takeshi and Daniela's house). We talked for a bit, then one of the other mentors, a wonderful young woman from D.F., came over and we chatted with her. My mentor had to leave for a meeting and I continued to chat with Natalia, la difena, and another woman everyone referred to as "DDR", or Dana. It went very well and I must say that now I am pretty excited about school.

In fact, I am already trying to get myself involved. An older fellow archaeologist is on the committee for the student arm of the SAAs (Soceity for American Archaeology), so I told him that I am up for helping with all that. Not only is it something I could add to my C.V., but it sounds like it could be a lot of fun as well. Now that I am getting into the swing of things, I am feeling much better about being here and moving away from all my friends and family and everything I've ever known. And I think that will be even more true once classes start on Monday. Sweet.