Hello!

So, as you may have been able to divine from the title of this blog, I'm moving to Fargo. This is, by almost any metric, a very strange decision. I love living in Washington DC, and I hate that I'm going to be one of those people who stays here for two years (well, one year and ten and a half months, but who's counting?) and then takes off. I've made some incredible friends here, I like being able to go important peoples' talks about politics, I like eating vegan cheesecake at Busboys and Poets, I like playing kickball in the shadow of the Washington Monument. I could have stayed in DC, but it would have meant starting a PhD program that I wasn't sure would be a good fit for me. I also could have gone to the University of Delaware, but it wasn't clear that I would get funding there, so even though I met some great people on my visit (well, one really great person, but who's counting?), I couldn't justify going there either. And that left North Dakota State University. For context, I'll be studying Emergency Management, which is a sufficiently narrow field that there are only four places in the country you can earn a PhD studying it. I think NDSU will be the best place for me because of the academic freedom I'll have and, well, the funding. I'm excited to be moving forward professionally and intellectually, but I'm also scared shitless, for lack of a better term. I don't know a single person in Fargo, I've never been there, I don't know who the other members of my cohort will be or even if there will be other people in my cohort. I don't know that much about emergency management. Basically, I'm going in completely blind.

But that's exciting, right? Of course, there's something to be said for, you know, having relationships with people that last longer than four years (or two, as the case may be), but I think it will also be good for me to shake things up a bit socially. I may be lonely at first, but if I've learned anything about myself since moving to Washington, it's that I tend to attract conversations with random strangers. If that's true here, I can only imagine how many people will talk to me in a place renown for its friendliness. And if I really can't make friends, I'm only three and a half hours away from Minneapolis.

I'm not going to be moving until July, but I wanted to start writing now because I'll be getting ready to leave over the next couple of weeks, and I'm headed out (for the first time!) this week to find an apartment. Plus, who doesn't love reading about saying goodbye to beloved people and places? So there may be some of that here too. I know it's incredibly self-indulgent to write a blog about something as commonplace as moving to a new city, but I'm hoping to stay as connected to people as possible, and I've found that keeping a blog helps me do that. I hope you'll excuse my narcissism. Thanks for reading!