Somehow I only have a week of grad school left. I don't know how this happened. One minute I'm moving to Fargo, the next minute I'm... well, staying in Fargo. That is, I'm staying in Fargo for the time being -- I will go wherever someone will pay me to go, honestly. I have some totally new, crazy ideas about the future that I'm sorting through at the moment (stay tuned!), so that's got me kind of disorganized on the job front. Really, a week before graduation is not necessarily the best time to start having epiphanies about what you want to do with your life, but I'm trying to roll with the punches. Anyway, the next week is actually going to be pretty busy -- I have two papers I need to wrap up, both about insurance, so many jobs to apply for, plus my dad's coming up on Friday for graduation, and I'll need to have at least two complete emotional meltdowns before Saturday.
Because I may not have a ton of time this week, I want to spend a little time taking stock of my experiences over the past two years right now. It's impossible to overstate the fact that I'm leaving graduate school a very different person than I was when I got here. Leaving DC was, for a number of reasons, one of the hardest things I've ever done, and my first year in Fargo was probably one of the most painful of my life. That being said, I'm glad I left, and I wouldn't trade the experiences I've had here. Had I spent another year in Washington, I wouldn't have met Sam, Laura, John and Jared, not to mention Jennie and Lauren, all of whom I now have a hard time imagining my life without. Had I never come to Fargo at all, I also wouldn't have gotten to spend time with Emily, Julia, Dan, Morgan, and Teddy; and I would never have met Erin, Chris, Yiny, Alison, Will, Theresa, Cody, Jan and so, so many other people who have made me feel like a member of the Fargo community. (This is starting to feel like an award acceptance speech, I'm sorry, but you all are important to me.) I really am so grateful for the people I've met, and the people I've gotten to know better since moving here.
While I made friends here I was also, well, bored a lot. I spent a lot of time, especially when I hadn't made close friends, by myself -- working through things that have always bothered me about myself, and coming to a much better understanding of what kind of person I am. My mother said to me, during my first winter when I was about as miserable as I've ever been, "You're like Moses in the desert," which is arguably hyperbolic, but also felt pretty apt. I'd go to Target, and see a woman in a bejeweled "NRA" t-shirt, and get totally overwhelmed, like, 'what the hell am I doing in North Dakota? What was I thinking??' On the one hand, the kind of cultural and political isolation I felt in those moments sort of gave me the license I needed to do the introspection I wouldn't have done otherwise. On the other hand, the community I've found and built here, in spite of those cultural and political differences (ahem, I will never stop fighting with you, Chris), has made me feel like I'm capable of getting by just about anywhere. God, there's so much more to say but I'm going to leave it at that.
In addition to all this personal and social growth, I can't overemphasize how much I've grown academically. When I first started classes, the intellectual changes I experienced were pretty dramatic -- I really felt like the architecture of my brain was changing to accommodate new knowledge. As I'm completing my studies here, and thinking back on how I processed information when I arrived, the sum total of those intellectual changes is hard to believe. Not only do I have more knowledge about emergency management and research methods, I also have a new apparatus for integrating new knowledge, and while I've had a lot of great instructors here, I really have Jessica to thank for that. Obviously, from this blog alone, you can probably tell that I have a long way to go before I'm as efficient a thinker as I'd like to be, but I think I've made big strides. For many subjects, I now have frameworks in place to help me determine how new data fits into the grand scheme; and where I don't have a framework, I have a way to parse data in order to develop one. I find I'm increasingly able to organize information, and to communicate it in a way that other people have some hope of understanding (still working on this, though). Regardless of what I end up doing, I know that these skills will serve me well.
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