First Day of School

I had my first day of graduate class today.  It was a health informatics graduate seminar.  The topic of the class is the impact of emerging and disruptive technologies in health care delivery.  There were 11 students in the class.  We watched a couple of videos on telecommunication services in the 1960s and Microsoft’s vision on future health care.  Dr. Roudsari introduced the concept of disruptive technology.  Then we had round table discussions on the issues around the emerging technologies and the impact these technologies are making in health care such as patient privacy and confidentiality, staff training, PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System), socio-economic status, budgets, etc.  The two-hour class felt like 20 minutes went by without me even noticing it.  I guess graduate school is different from undergraduate school after all.  I felt great.  I loved it!

Maybe it was just the break I had from the office.  It must, definitely, be the break from the office.  I don’t think I took any breaks from 1:30 to 6 this afternoon.  I’m totally snowed under with the amount of work in the office.  I have work piled up to October already.  Every body is back to work in September, and every body wants data.  From today onward for the rest of the year, I will be working until 6PM every work day to make up the hours loss for me to go to class on Wednesdays.  I’m completely not looking forward to riding home in the dark, cold and wet November nights.  Hell, for the next two years, I might not even have a life.  My director came by my desk around clock-out time and yelled, “GO HOME! GET A LIFE!  Oh wait, you are a student now. You don’t have a life.”  Something tells me that I’m in a love and hate relationship with graduate school.

I gave up tutoring.  I feel sad about it.  I secretly miss it, sometimes.  Every Monday night around 7 o’clock, I think of the two-hours I would have spent with my students, my two almost younger sisters.  I’ve been around Gen and Giselle ever since when they were 8 and 6 years old.  Part of me thinks that I failed at teaching them Cantonese because after all these years of tutoring, they are still not fluent in Cantonese.  Part of me just thinks that I’m being too hard on myself and the girls.  Learning a foreign language once a week is difficult.  I almost teared in our last class last month reviewing the things we learned all these years.  Seeing them speaking the language made me feel proud.

Lindsay just emailed me with a new client today.  I have no idea how I’m going to juggle work, grad school and personal training in the next couple of years.  I know I’ll go through it.  I always go through it.