Tag Archives: grad school

Mastering a Goal

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Good morning and Happy Monday! I’ve been a little more quiet on the blog lately, because I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a very long-term goal… my THESIS!

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I started graduate school in 2010, twoweeks after I got married, and two months after I had scored a big promotion. I remember nervously sitting around a table of unfamiliar faces, still glowing from my honeymoon, starting to freak out a little bit as my eyes scanned the lengthy syllabus of research methods. At work, I went from a copywriter to a content manager, managing a team of three people, writing Facebook updates and blogs for nine different brands. I worked at least 45 hours a week and went to class at night, exhausted, bleary-eyed and hungry, but I made it through with my laptop, diet coke and the support of my husband and family.

I had intended for grad school to take two years, but as the reality of school set in, I knew it would take longer. I ended up staying for three years, and in those three years, I met wonderful friends, some of whom read this blog. (Hi Julie, Emily, Lauren, Virginia and Luis!) I also worked my way through stress-eating (Something I’m still fighting), cried when my 36 page literature review came back for the 10th time needing more revisions (I’m not exaggerating. That %&$#! lit review came back ten times!), traveled to Thailand, lost my sweet kitty Leo, and did a million other things. Life always went on, but it went on with a giant weight on my shoulders – my thesis. I turned down fun party invitations, missed family vacations and spent hours glued to my computer. I wrote and re-wrote huge chunks of the same text, over and over again. I made a lot of sacrifices for the past three years to work on this thesis, but I was always grateful I had the opportunity to be learning and to be in grad school. It was hard. But I did it.

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The first photo of me as Alyssa Curran, MA. Taken minutes after my thesis was approved – with happy tears still shiny in my eyes!

Last Thursday, at 2 pm, I paced the hallways of the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media and Communication while my thesis committee deliberated my final project. I had come prepared with 106 pages of my own work, two PDFs of the social media handbook you can read at SocialSyllabi.com, and a cheat sheet of notes. I defended my project in front of two women I greatly respect, both who are doctorates, one in education, one in journalism, women who have worked at the Los Angeles Times and have been embedded in war zones. At the end of an hour and a half of changes, they signed a paper and shook my hand – I had just earned my master’s degree!

When they signed the paper, I wanted to leap across the table and hug them. Tears flooded my eyes and I had to do that embarrassing fan-your-face thing to prevent myself from bursting into happy, joyous tears. I have worked SO HARD for this degree, and I am so proud of myself. I’m not usually a braggart (ok, fine, sometimes I can be), but I’ve been basking in my accomplishment the past week. I have a MASTER’S DEGREE before I’m even 28 years old. THAT is awesome. THAT is accomplishment. THAT is hard work, and opportunity, and commitment – and THAT reminds me that this whole weight loss thing? It might be the hardest thing I’ve ever worked on in my life, but I can do this, too. My Master’s Degree taught me a lot. Not just about dedication and time, but about perseverance. About not throwing in the towel when all you want to do is quit. About keeping going, when your eyes are heavy and your heart is tired. About not comparing yourself to others, about realizing this journey is your own – no one elses, and if your heart is in it, you will get there, regardless of your pace. I need to remember these thoughts, these feelings, when the number on the scale is up, when my jeans feel snug, when I compare myself to a thin girl and think that I am not enough. I can do this. I will do this.

My sweet friend Ruby and I in 2008. We are still friends to this day!

My sweet friend Ruby and I in 2008. We are still friends to this day!

My master’s degree is so much more to me than just a paper saying I’m well educated in the field of mass communication and media. It’s a reminder for me that when I work hard, I can do anything. I just need to remember to take it one step at a time, believe in myself, and try my best. On May 21 I’ll once again walk across the Oviatt Library steps, exactly five years after I earned my BA in Journalism in the same spot. In a lot of ways, I’m a different person than who I was in 2008, but one thing remains the same – my ambition to make my life worth living to the fullest, every minute of every day. I am proud of the person I am, and you should be proud of who you are, too.

So tell me – what is one thing in your life, big or small, that makes you proud of the person you are today?

 

Busy busy bee

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Have you guys heard Rimsky Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee?” Take a listen from these fine fellows of Canadian Brass:

I feel like this piece is the musical accompaniment to my life the past three weeks. As you know, I’m in the final stages of finishing my master’s degree, a three-year long process that’s caused me a lot of grief. When you write a thesis, you go through millions of revisions, up to the point that you “defend”, which means you basically defend your completed work in front of a small group people and respond back to the comments and constructive criticism your graduate committee might have. At this point they can either sign a piece of paper granting you approval, and you graduate, or they can say they need more changes before they sign it and hopefully you’ll graduate, or they can say “You’re SOL”. I’ve been making changes left and right, and I’m really hoping on Thursday when I defend that I’ll have minimal changes to make before I get the all-clear to graduate. It’s been crazy… and I’m ready to get my life back to the still very busy but totally doable routine of work, blog, fitness, relationships, friends and maybe, just maybe, house-hunting. (PS big shout out to April for being so awesome and picking up my blogging slack! You go, girl!)

I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been stressed. My desire to stress-eat has been intense. After one particularly rough day last week when I got the first set of revisions and 10 e-mails stared me down with lists of things I had to immediately change, my first instinct was to make popcorn and crunch away my anxiety. But I didn’t – I took a quick walk around the block, came back, had a mango, and settled down to get to it.

Yes, I still ate out of stress, but it was a small mango – much less damaging than a bowl of calorie-laden salty crunchy popcorn. (PS – My latest passionate fruit love affair is definitely Mango. I just took our relationship to the next level by buying the giant jumbo pack from Costco!) I’m still making time to fit in exercise, and tonight, I met with a friend (Hi Suz!) for a long leisurely walk. I’m trying to view exercise as less of an item on my to-do list and more of as a natural stress relief. I know those endorphins will mellow me out, because my body’s been in a particularly flighty panic mode as I imagine not graduating and being sentenced to what feels like the rest of my life in grad school. But that’s just anxiety – anxiety I can work through by getting good nights of sleep, eating well, and fitting in exercise when I can. It’s weeks like this that remind me even if the scale isn’t showing what I want, I’ve made huge changes in my life when it comes to food and fitness.The old Alyssa would have no problem eating popcorn when stressed, nor would she hesitate to blow off all forms of fitness just because it was one more thing to do. But Alyssa 2.0 knows that living a healthy life means not just losing weight, but managing stress, too.

Have you been stressed out this week? How are you managing it?

What does a thesis have to do with pizza?

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Happier times with pizza!

On Friday, I overate. I knew what I was doing. I didn’t like what I was doing, but I was conscious of it. Most of you know from my frequent bitching and moaning that I’m in the process of writing a thesis. Grad school is only for masochists, people who like to whip themselves with the heavy lashings of 475 page articles and the horrors of APA style. In December, I’m supposed to be done with 2.5 years of my own personal torture – a torture I inflicted on myself in the pursuit of self-betterment and personal fulfillment. Despite my complaints, I really do love learning and school. I’m just getting kind of burnt out on it.

With all of the changes going on in my life, my thesis has taken the back seat. In addition, I had completed 36 pages of my first thesis topic when it was decided that my project wasn’t sustainable and I had to start over from scratch. This week, there’s been discussion about delaying my completion date to Spring 2013. In my heart, I know this is a better option, because it will mean less sacrifice – less sacrifice of quality, and less sacrifice of time and good health. Yet, it means I’ll be prolonging the stress of this gigantic 150-page baby I’ll eventually be birthing, paying for another semester, and having to wear the hat of full-time employee + grad student for another 5 months.

So, I ordered a pizza for Matt and I for dinner, and while I flitted around the house trying to pack (have I mentioned this is my fourth trip out of town in three weeks? Yikes) I ate one piece. Then I ate a second. Then I ate a third. And then I ate a fourth. And then I stopped – and realized what I was doing, something I hadn’t done in a long time. I was emotionally eating. I was upset about my thesis and my possible delayed graduation, and I decided to push away that feeling by eating pizza. (Why does emotional eating NEVER happen with celery?). My brain was craving dopamine – an instant reward – and so I gobbled down the pizza, hoping to fill that feeling of sadness with something else.

It’s a shitty realization that sometimes your way of dealing with problems is just adding another problem to your life.  However, there’s a bright side to every little cloud of doom and gloom, and this bright side is that today, I realized what I was doing. Before I started seeing my dietician, I never knew I emotionally ate. I think I knew it but I didn’t acknowledge it, didn’t know how to stop it. I’ll never forget the day one of my former bosses told me I was a disappointment – and how right after work, I drove to the grocery store, bought a bag of potato chips, and stuffed them into my mouth as I drove home. It was the only way I knew how to deal with that absolutely raw feeling of devastation. I’ve come a long way from this type of relationship with food, but tonight proved to me that I can’t ever fully cure myself of using food to pacify emotions. We live in a culture that encourages using food for feeling – the woman who just got dumped eats ice cream, the woman with PMS craves  chocolate. After a funeral, casseroles show up at your door, and with a new job comes celebratory dinners. Birthdays mean cake and weddings mean champagne (and more cake), Christmas means cookies and Thanksgiving means turkey. Food is feeling.

Tonight, it took me awhile to get there, but I finally made that mind-body connection and thought to myself, “Stop it. You’re not hungry, you’re upset – and those are two different feelings.” That alone is progress – one that may not fix me feeling sad about a delayed graduation, but one that in the long term, will help save my life.

 

 

 

Big Bear Getaway, Part 1

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Hanna Flat, Fawnskin & Big Bear Lake

This weekend, my grad school friends Julie, Emily, Virginia and I packed up the truck and headed southeast to Big Bear Lake. Big Bear is an awesome little alpine escape that’s a quick 2 hour drive from Los Angeles, yet feels like it’s a world away. We stayed at the charming Hanna Flat campground and had an amazing time listening to the howling wolves and staring up at the towering redwoods touching the star-studded sky.

Julie and Alyssa tackle the tent

After a two hour drive and a lunch of greek yogurt and funyuns (hey – the gas stati0n had nothing else and we tried four different exits to find food!), we arrived at our campsite and tackled challenge #1: the tent. I don’t know if there’s some of man code in my family that makes them believe that women can’t assemble tents, but both my husband and father chuckled when we described how we’d be staying in Emily’s suave six person tent. “Oh,” they said. “Have you ever assembled a tent?”. Well, no, I hadn’t, but I can make a fierce grilled cheese… so I’m pretty sure i can do anything. (Confidence. I has it.) Here’s photographic proof that I helped assemble the tent – and no tents, tools or woodland creatures were harmed in the process. And yes, it was a pain to assemble but – totally bearable. Kind of like getting a tattoo. Annoyance < Awesomeness.

Boulder Bay, Big Bear Lake

Once the tent was properly set up, we donned our bathing suits and headed over to the gorgeous Boulder Bay. Boulder bay is surrounded by multi-million dollar cabins with huge bay windows overlooking the mountains and lake. It’s pretty much paradise. Emily and Virginia bravely swam in the cold water while Julie and I skipped rocks, chatted and soaked up the sun.

 

Log Cabin Restaurant has so many good eats!

After a couple hours swimming, we headed to my favorite Big Bear establishment, the Log Cabin restaurant. After sharing our ghost photo from last time with the management (much to their delight) we ordered a delicious dinner and headed back to our campsite. Stay tuned for the next post to read about my big bear tummy, and why I didn’t get this blog posted today. (Let’s just say that after the 10,786th time this has happened, I might finally be realizing that eating clean for a long time and then eating junk is a recipe for disaster.) Did you have a good weekend too? What’d ya do?

Weekly Weigh In #10

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Well, there was no weekly weigh in #10. I was in a meeting that ran long, (we have Weight Watchers meetings at work at lunch -they start at 12, my meeting ended at 12:15.) I didn’t have any lunch, and I desparately needed to work on my literature review. So I didn’t go. There was some internal hemming and hawing about me deliberately deciding to skip a meeting, but the stars just didn’t align. I have the slightest suspicion that I might have lost more weight this week – although my eating choices have been less than stellar, I’ve been clocking in 15 hour work days between work, homework and freelance projects – leaving me little time for grazing.

Copyediting at my desk at work... on lunch.

While I may not have succeeded in a weight loss accomplishment this week (and I don’t know if I did – I’ll try to weigh in tomorrow or this weekend), I did have a major academic accomplishment. In grad school, part of your thesis is analyzing at least 30 different pieces of research and summarizing why they might be important to what you’re studying, called a “lit review”. Here’s the beginning of it all: The 38 page baby I just birthed, as in uploaded to Google docs for my whole thesis cohort and committee advisor to read and edit. As you can see, this picture was taken at work – and this was on my lunch break, as I skipped lunch (that’s bad, I know) and used my little red pen to mark my way to awesomeness.

Here’s what my wild and crazy Wednesday night was like:

Wine + Thesis = BFF

So there you have it. I may not have invested enough time in my physical self this week, but I rocked it on the academic front. It’s one of those days where other than the slightly nagging pain in the ball of my foot (plantar fascia – heel pain from being fat and wearing crappy, supportless ballet flats), weight loss is far from my mind. I’m in an academic zone – focused, ambitious and determined to get this done. I’m eight months away from graduating with my master’s degree, and that makes me damn PROUD of myself.

However, I’m not going to let pride get in the way of working towards the happiest, healthiest lifestyle I can have, and that means getting back to the gym, cutting out the late night wine and peeps (yeah – it happened),and not skipping meals. Now that this initial deadline has passed, I’m giving myself a few days off of homework for spring break and focusing on getting back into the exercise routine, since I didn’t manage to make it once this week. I’m also going to spend time with my dear husband, whom I call the “grad school widow” when school’s in session.

So that’s where I’m at! Focused mentally and academically, but distant and sort of floating on the weight loss side of things. We can’t have it all.. but I can try 😉

How’s your week going? Anything exciting happening? Make sure to check in on Monday for your chance to win an EatSmart Food Scale!

 

Making Time for Exercise

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Hey everybody! How you doin’ out there? I feel a little distant this week… because school is in FULL BLOWN “GO” mode, and life is just moving along at a crazy pace. Here’s what my schedule was like yesterday: Work from 8 AM – 3:30 PM. Class from 4:00 – 7: 00. Participate in Social Media Panel from 7:00 – 9:00 PM. Eat Dinner at 9:30 PM. Work on homework from 9:30 – 11:00 PM. 11:00 Go to bed.

Thankfully not everyday is as crazy as that, but today was not much better with working from 9:00 – 5:00 PM and then heading right to the hospital for allergy shots from 5:30 – 6:30 PM and then the rest of the evening being spent doing homework. It’s exhausting, right? It’s exhausting and I’ve been slacking about fitness because of it.

Fitness is fun with Richard Simmons! Why can't it be like this every time?!

I work with a wonderful and very funny friend named Jenny. She’s become a Weight Watchers buddy for me, and tonight, a reality check. We were texting back and forth about a Zumba class for $5 that’s offered at my workplace at 7 PM. I normally leave work at 5 PM, so I’ve been hesitant to stay for Zumba because that’s two hours of “home” time I get to have. After I hemmed and hawed and explained why I didn’t want to stay for Zumba, she hit me with this one: “You know you’re going to go home and veg and not exercise! If there’s no time to exercise then you won’t lose weight as fast as you like.”

She’s right. I’m the mayor of excuses village. When it comes to weight loss, I transform into a flubbery, blubbering “But this is why this happened! It’s genetics! It’s because I’m bloated! It’s because my jeans weigh a pound and a half! It’s because I ate that salty soup!”

The reality is that I need to be accountable for the mistakes I make in regards to weight loss, just like I am at work. If I screw up on something at work, I fess up, because usually just admitting your mistake is going to make it better. Like when I got busted in a meeting this week by my colleague as I was doodling hearts and stars all over my legal pad .”Did you get that, Alyssa?” she said, with a bit of sarcasm in her voice. With a straight face, I looked up and said, “Nope. I wasn’t listening. I’m sorry, can you repeat it?” There’s no need to lie because I’m transparent about my actions at work. I’m not perfect. I will never be. I have no problem admitting it. Perfection isn’t the problem, its commitment. It’s willpower. How bad do I want this?

I’m struggling because I am genuinely, honestly busy. I don’t have a lot of free time. But I need to make this a priority, just like I make work and grad school and my husband and my friends and family a priority. How do you fit it all in? We’re all busy, so I can’t keep using it as an excuse. Life is busy. As John Lennon once said, life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.

Do you find lack of time can screw up your eating or fitness habits? What do you do to be prepared? Any hints for a gal like me – short on time but big on hope?