What were they thinking?

The last couple of days have been a blur. I moved into my new school apartment on Friday, and I have spent the last two days trying to settle in and getting acquainted with the area. So far, I have been able to get my new school ID done and I also met with the departmental staff for my orientation package. Yesterday, I rode the bus to the mall where I did some shopping for groceries and stuff (it is alarming how fast I am spending money and it is only day two!). I don’t know what to think of my new school, I am yet to meet any other students in my department other than the graduate RA who helped me check in. Orientation does not start till Wednesday, so I have at least one day to myself before the madness begins. My plan is to try having everything sorted out before orientation starts and hopefully, I might get some time leftover to catch up with my gym work which has been in neglect for several days now.

In other news, I was looking through my orientation package tonight and everything looked standard until I came to my TA assignment course. That is when I hit some major panic. I have been rather apprehensive about the whole TA’ship thing since I have never really done anything of the sort. After talking to a few graduate students, I was reassured that most TA assignments are normally for lower level classes and labs. So you can imagine my shock and disbelief when I found that I have been assigned as TA to a senior level class. There has got to be a mistake because honestly, I don’t know what they were thinking. For starters, it is basically acknowledged in my field that the class I am supposed to TA is probably the hardest class you will ever have to go through at the undergraduate level. Even to this day, I am still trying to understand some of those concepts. I still remember the day my class had its last exam in the course. The exam had been a comprehensive, standardized one and the results were terrible. We really didn’t care. As far as we were concerned, the ordeal was over and we could move on with our lives. I have never been so drunk as I was that evening. So to imagine I have to go through all that again, in addition to providing solace and advice to suffering undergraduates, just feels wrong. Tomorrow, early in the morning, I am going to head over to school and see whether I can find out from the departmental secretary what the deal is. Hopefully, it is just an over sight.