turned it in!

Good news: yesterday, I turned in the first (very rough) draft of the first chapter of my dissertation!

Bad news: I'm kinda feeling down in the dumps right now, and I don't know why. It has NOTHING to do with having finished the first draft because I have a ton of other work I can do for the dissertation.

. . . and it has nothing to do with monthly cycles either . . . there's absolutely nothing wrong in my life that I can think of. :) Ah well.

Okay, I should explain the elections and what was on my mind last week (besides badminton). Part of the terms of our scholarship at the dorm, T-ride, is that we work on committees to run the house. The Advisory Commitee (Adcom) is made up of 3 members elected by the House, and they assign everyone else to committees (such as House and Grounds, Employee Coordination, Outreach, Academic Affairs, Social Events, Computing, etc.).

Basically, in the past AdCom has wielded a lot of power because they aslo mediate at times of crisis and conflict. This semester, a few of us got together and drafted a legislation that would create a separate committee that would take over all kinds of mediation, and who will be the people we call on if there are cases of sexual or other kinds of harassment.

Okay, explaining everything is going to take too long. I'll just aim for semi-comprehension from here on.

Basically, I got elected to AdCom, and K-gan was made First Ad i.e. House President. This is a pretty big deal (and I won't go into why exactly that's the case), especially since K-gan and I are part of the same--rather large--faction in the house. :)

At this point, I can't even remember why I wanted to blog about this in the first place. There was a reason, but I can't remember now.

A few days into the job, and I'm already learning a TON about being a leader of sorts in a small community of VERY smart, VERY accomplished, and VERY ambitious group of people. I have a feeling that I'm going to have an interesting semester.