School Starts Tomorrow!

Hi All!

I'm back from exploring Italy with my parents, and I'm starting school tomorrow!! I'm definitely mostly excited, I'm just not sure what I'm doing. There's this thing where I've never been a PhD student before. But neither has anyone else, so it doesn't count much.

What I'm really really excited about, though, are my classes. I only have to take about six seminars over the entire course of my program since I'm on the already-has-a-Master's-and-a-bit-of-a-plan track (I sincerely hope they're right), then I need two Master's level courses since I've never studied Economics before. I have plenty of flexibility to not take many courses if I don't want to, but all the courses look so interesting! Right now I'm signed up for seven, so I'll probably be dropping a few as we go. But they're so interesting!

My biggest hurdle this week will be figuring out where all my dang classes are. When I signed up for classes (which in itself was a bit of a process) I got course websites from three of my classes, but the others refuse to tell me anything about themselves. And most of the University information is in German. Which I'll be learning for real once the semester starts! So this week should be interesting. And I'll make lots of new friends asking random people what I'm supposed to be doing.

In the meantime, though, I'll share as much as I can about our fabulous road trip through Northern Italy. With Martin and my parents (who are visiting!), we explored Heidelberg, Germany; then Verona, Venice, Florence (and Tuscany), the Cinque Terre, and Milan. It was my first time in Italy and it was fabulous!

I'll be busy!

Love Katie