Lessons Learned

I made it through graduate school year number one. Yay yay yay! Toot toot. Beep beep.

In honor of it being over (someone start singing the Hallelujah chorus, STAT!), I've decided to make a list of some of the things I've learned.

**Kat didn't get any nicer from the beginning of the fall semester into the end of the spring semester. I've given up on her.

**There is NOTHING more gratifying than seeing the look on a child's face (and the faces of his caregivers) when he hears his mother say his name for the first time. This little boy got a cochlear implant, and that was the first session in which they turned it on. He was born profoundly deaf, but is now able to hear his siblings and mother and father talk to him. Amazing.



**Sometimes, teachers can be evil. Even if their name isn't Kat. And even if they happen to be one of my favorite professors in grad school. Ask me about my Speech Science quiz one day. But only if you want to make me mad. Really mad.

**Speech Pathology school is HARD. I mean seriously. HARD. I cried at least every day four times because of the ridiculous test questions that have been thrown my way.

**The operating room is the funnest place to be in the hospital. Especially when I'm not the one on the table.

**The human body is INCREDIBLY resilient.

**The sports teams at Tech are amazing. They go out of their way to make appearances and make a hospital stay better for people. They earned a lot of respect from me this semester.

**L-town has some amazing doctors, and the opportunities to work with them is suuuuuuuch a blessing. I've learned so much. Thank you, Lord, for Dr. Z. :)

**Sometimes when you think about all you think you can't do, you realize all you can. And that makes for a great day.

**Maggots can live in people's ears. And they can be sucked out with an instrument the size of a straw that sounds much like a vacuum cleaner. And hearing loss goes away when the maggots die. Imagine that. True story; I was there.

**Being number one in my class feels much better than being number two in my class.

**There are not enough breaks during a semester. My favorite weeks in the last year were Spring Break and Thanksgiving break. And Christmas break was pretty amazing, too.

**The little notes and cards that my parents and my sister sent in the mail pretty much every week make my day every single time.

**DVR is quite possibly the best invention ever. It makes it possible to set a series recording, skip through the commercials, watch my favorite TV shows every week, and still make all A's.

**When everything falls apart, it's important to remember that God already has the best plan in mind for my life.

**Reading Cosmo and Glamour is always much more fun than doing phonetics homework or calculating the resonances of formant frequencies.

**Undergrad is a walk in the park compared to graduate school.

**Only three tests to make up a final grade should be cruel and unusual punishment. That's not much wiggle room.

**The best way to avoid having a teacher randomly call on you (to answer a question about the readings you definitely did not do) is to avoid making eye contact at all times. It works every time. Not that I would know. ;)

**Sadie Jane and Sophie Grace are pretty good study buddies.

**Oh, and not reading the "required readings" doesn't mean you won't make an A. Again, not that I would know. I always read my "required readings". (You probably shouldn't believe that.)

**I'm still a terrible test taker.

**I love making my family proud.

**And last but not least, my Dad was proven right, yet again: "Em, they can't eat you."

Here is to an awesome second year of graduate school.

I love my life.