My first weekend as a grad student!

Last weekend was my first weekend at Southern New Hampshire University's School of Community Economic Development!!!

SNHU is located in Manchester, a small city of about 100,000 (although this does make it one of the largest cities in New England!) The city is known for its textile manufacturing industry, much like its English namesake, which was huge from the early 19th century until the 1930s.

It took Mom and me about 5 hours to drive down from Montreal, including a little mix-up at the border, when Mom blurted out that (a) I'm going to study in the U.S. although I don't have a student visa, and/but (b) it's ok because I'm an American citizen, though I had nothing to proove that statement. No surprise that the border official then said "Would you please pull over, ma'am?" We got it all sorted out and were on our way in no time. The thing is, even if I didn't have my American citizenship I wouldn't needa visa because I'm not going down to the States to live while I study. A fun little detour, though!

Thursday was a day-long orientation at the school. Lots of introductions, turns out I'm the only Canadian in the program this year, and academic and financial advising and so on. The CED program has two cohorts, national and international. The difference is that national CED students will study CED in the American context and plan to work in the U.S. International CED is for students who plan to work overseas (e.g. me!) or with international communities in the States (e.g. refugees, immigrants). So my cohort only has eight students, which is really nice because we'll get to know each other better and will have more opportunity for in-depth class discussions. Besides me there are two Americans, three Rwandese, a Liberian (though born in Guinea) and a Sudanese; such a diverse group, isn't it? I am so excited about our group!

The rest of the weekend was filled with class time: on Friday, I had a morning class on Principles, Practices and Policy of International CED. The professor is fantastic, and she's also my academic advisor! Her expertise is mainly in gender issues in CED; I have always been passionate about women's issues and gender equality, so I'm really glad I will be able to learn from her. The assignments for the course are really interesting, and I'm excited just for the fact that a lot of the course reading has been on my "to-read" bookshelf for a while!

On Saturday, I had a day long course on Project Design. One great component of the program is that, instead of writing a thesis to obtain my degree, I have to plan and implement a CED project right in Montreal!! How awesome is that? I will be doing my project in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, a very poor area in Montreal; my research will be on "Economic behaviours of families in the poorest census tracks in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, where over 40% of the population lives under the LICO (Low Income Cut-Off)." The project will be research-based, so I can't tell you what projct I'll be doing yet!

On Sunday, I had 7 hours - that's right, SEVEN HOURS - of Accounting!! Some people took a waiver exam to get out of doing this course, some passed, most failed, and because I have no accounting background whatsoever, I didn't even bother taking the test. Although it was a long day, I really did enjoy it and find it exciting to start understanding the concepts and how to actally do accounting.

As you can imagine, I was echausted by the end of the weekend. Actually the picture above was taken on Friday night, so I was already exhausted by then! I'm glad I'm only taking three courses this semester, it will allow me to ease into the student thing and give me some extra time to do Chab Dai stuff and put in some hours with my part-time contract to make some money.

Thanks for all your encouragement. I'm really happy to be a student again, and feel right at home in this program. A la prochaine!