My Very Good Day

Hooray! I had a good day, and now I'm excited about my semester! And I can't stop thinking in exclamation points!

First of all, my Canadian history course has other PhD candidates. That deserves three exclamation points: !!! This is officially my first grad course with other PhD candidates. AND my two seminar topics are commemoration and urban history (hoorah!). AND for our next session I'm supposed to bring some sort of Canadian history textbook, so that we can get into the practice of looking at frameworks of Canadian history, rather than just the "facts." (We're looking at how we tell our history.) Some of us are doing regional histories, and so today I took out both Saskatchewan: A History by John Archer, and the recently-published Saskatchewan: A New History by Bill Waiser. It felt like home. Think about it: in my next session, I get to explain Saskatchewan history to a group of grad students!

While I was killing time between my Canadian and European history classes, I ran into a PhD student who informed me that we have an office, where I can do my reading and eat my lunch. I finally found this out for sure, and next Monday I'm going to take in a $5 to the department office (as a deposit, in exchange for a key) and check it out. Hooray, a place to eat my lunch!

My European history class was especially spectacular. As I was going over the readings, I realised that several of the assigned articles and chapters are from books I own, or ones that I know well. We're focusing on nineteenth century (up to 1914) European politics, which is quite convenient, considering the fact that one of my MA courses was Germany from 1870-1914. We have a lot of leeway regarding our major papers for the course, and so I'm going to do something fairly close to my field. Yay for an opportunity to re-read James Retallack's Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II (considering the fact that it outlines different historiographical problems facing the Kaiser Reich, I think it would be a good place to start brainstorming for essay ideas).

Finally, there's a new MA student in my European history course (who is going to be specialising in Weimar Germany), and I helped him get registered in his classes, sign up for an e-mail account, and get a Student ID. He was in a very similar place to where I was at the beginning of last semester: very new, very confused, and not able to do anything. (Couldn't register without computer access. Needed a Netlink ID to access a university computer. Couldn't get a Netlink ID without registering for classes... I signed him on to a computer with my ID.) It felt good to know what I was doing, and to help someone who was new and lost.

And I got one of my scholarship cheques today.

So, in summary:

• My courses are all familiar territory, and yet exciting. (This helps me to feel at home, and to feel like a competent scholar.)
• I have a place to call home, at the University.
• I helped someone else today, which made me feel really good. And I got to know a lot of nice people today.
• I paid off my Christmas airplane tickets.

I'm even feeling relaxed when I'm at school. I've had a very good day.