Lord Willing, we will go here and do that...

I have been asked recently about what Justin and I am doing and what our plans are, so here is a brief summary.

[Note: any references to children are speculative. We are not pregnant, we just know we want to have kids at some point.]

I am in my first year of graduate school (for a Ph.D.) in economics. I would like to be a professor when I am done. There are a lot of caveats to this however. Supposedly being a professor is very competative; your research has to be very good. I've never done research so I don't know how good I will be at it. Also, it depends on where we're living. Since I am not a single person, I cannot just apply to lots of places and go wherever I get a job. And of course, most importantly, we want to have kids. We don't know exactly when, but assuming I have kids by the time I am looking for jobs, they will be my first priority. Ideally I could find some sort of job that allows me to teach and research part-time. One of my undergraduate professors who was encouraging me to go to grad school said "everyone needs to hire women! And being a professor is an easy job. You'll have lots of time to raise baby!" I don't know how accurate that is, but I suppose I'll find out. Of course, all this depends largely on what Justin is doing.

Justin is in his first year of graduate school (for a Master's) in geophysics. He thinks he might want to be a professor also, or maybe work in industry doing research & development. He has the option to continue at A&M for his Ph.D. The benefit to this would be continuity (working on the same stuff with the same professor), and he would be done sooner than if he were to go elsewhere. The (obvious) downside is that he would have to continue commuting for several more years, or we would have to move to College Station. We also have anecdotal evidence that to stay in academia (i.e. become a professor) it's better to get your Ph.D. somewhere other than where you did undergrad. So another option for him is to go somewhere else for his Ph.D. If he were to go to Rice, he could of course start as soon as he finished his Master's. Or he could wait until I'm done with enough of my school that I can live somewhere else, and we could move to be close to his school of choice. If we were both students or professors with reasonably flexible schedules, this might work well for raising children. Of course, if Justin goes to work full-time then I would need to be a lot more available for taking care of our future children.

There are certainly benefits to staying in Houston, most importantly being close to family. Having grandparents and aunts & uncles and cousins around would be good for our kids, I think. But we also think it would be fun to live somewhere else, at least for a while. We really enjoyed living in Denver last summer, getting to see a new place and experience different weather than we're used to.

I feel a little bit overwhelmed thinking about all the decisions we have ahead of us. Thankfully I know that I am not the controller of my life; for now Justin and I will both do our best in school, and try to plan responsibly for our future.

"Come now, you who say 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.' Yet you do not know what you life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.'" James 4:13-15

Rice International Cultural Night

Last night I went to the Rice International Cultural Night. One of my classmates was dancing with the group of Lebanese students. She's the middle (short) one:

Also, one of my TAs was playing in a band with other Turkish students. Both of these performances were very good, although I had trouble seeing, due to the chairs and people in front of me, and hearing, due to the noise of people that didn't stop talking the entire time.

There were a few lame performances/presentations, including a pre-recorded audio-visual presentation (i.e. a video) about Egypt that looked like it was made by the Egypt tourism department- it showed the airport, beautiful hotels, and white people enjoying Cairo's nightlife. There was also supposed to be some sort of traditional music performance by the Russian students' group, but it turned out to be one Russian student and 2 Turkish students (including my TA again!) playing a Turkish song. I guess the Russians didn't have enough musicians to make up a whole performance. Afterwards there was a variety of international foods for dinner. Yum! I even got to take home some Kung Pao chicken!

Classes, Homework and Qualifiers

At the conclusion of this school week, I will have only two weeks of class left this semester. I look forward to that with great anticipation, as I am getting quite burnt out from this semester.

I have 3 classes this semester. They can be summarized as follows:

• Microeconomic Theory: this is my favorite class, and is what I want to focus on. We don't have many homeworks for this class, and those that we have are not that bad, in my opinion, because I really like the subject.
• Macroeconomic Theory: I can see how some of this material is interesting, but it's not my favorite. This class has a LOT of homework, which seems very laborious to me since I am not as enthusiastic about this material. We are expected to have 2 more assignments in the remaining 2 weeks of this semester.
• Econometrics: this class is alright. We don't have much homework assigned, which is nice, but we're not forced to stay on top of the material. So there will be a lot of preparation required before the qualifier.

April 23 is our last day of classes; after that we'll be very busy taking finals and studying for qualifiers. However, I consider the end of classes to be a reasonable event to look forward to. For one thing, it's much closer than the end of qualifiers, so it seems more tangible. Also, I currently feel like I need to be studying for qualifiers as well as attending class and learning new material and doing homework assignments. Once classes are done, I will be able to focus on just one thing; I'll be making sure I know the material I've already covered, rather than trying to learn new stuff.