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Showing posts from December, 2016

Stuff That I Learned - The Older Student's Mind

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I’ve just completed my first semester of graduate school, and it went pretty well. The semester got off to a pretty bumpy start, though I had a lot of guidance and support in getting my nascent graduate career on track. The semester has recently ended, and I now feel the time and space to reflect on the past 15+ weeks. As you may know, I’m a bit older than the average graduate student. Since returning to school, many people have asked me questions about the process of returning to school; how do the other students treat me?   how do I balance work & school? do I notice changes in my mind? what’s it like being older than some of the professors? etc. Answering all of these questions would make for a very long blog entry, so I’ve chosen one question to address – the question about my mind. So – did I notice any changes in my mind? The short answer is yes, though the details have surprised even me. I expected that I would experience deficits in my capacity to memorize o

Stuff That I Learned - Week #15

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Busy - but committed to eating right, meditating and exercising Fall Semester of 2016 is nearly complete. I've learned more in one semester than I ever could have imagined, and I continue to delight in my good fortune to be a non-traditional graduate student at the University of Wisconsin - Madison . This week I had high hopes of writing more about neural control and/or my hearing, though the final push into exams is consuming more of my bandwidth than I had expected. Next week I hope to return to weekly updates. Please keep an eye on my blog into 2017, as I'll continue with weekly updates on  stuff that I learned . Next semester promises to be very interesting - I'm coming to refer to it as Neural Fest 2017 .