Home for the Holidays

Hey y'all!  It's me again!  Yes, I'm still alive, even if I haven't posted in several months.  It's just that the life of a grad student is much more time-consuming than I thought it would be.  I'd like to say my first semester went well, but sadly, that was not the case.  The main problem was that I made the mistake of thinking that I was ready to take graduate-level Abstract Algebra when in reality I wasn't.  Not only did I end up failing the class miserably, I ended up tanking in the rest of my classes as well.  I'll be frank with y'all, there were a lot of times when I thought about dropping out of grad school altogether, and a few days when I just had no will to live at all, when I thought I'd absolutely hit rock bottom and had nowhere to go.  Fortunately, I got a major reprieve last week - the math department decided to let me keep my assistantship, but I'm gonna be on a pretty short leash next semester.  I have to get at least 2 A's and a B, which means I'm gonna have to work my butt off, but it's all first-year courses that I'm taking this time around, and I have friends in each of my classes to whom I can turn for help.  I just need to start managing my time better and start off on the right foot so things don't snowball out of control like they did last semester. 

Anyway, now that I'm back home for Christmas and have a lot more free time, you can probably expect to start seeing more posts from me pretty soon.  There's been so much I've wanted to write about during these last few months, but I just never had the time.  We'll see how things go in the next few months.  Till then, stay frosty, y'all!

B-)