Getting my head around grad school

Well, dear blog, I have made another transition and need to process it. I tried to do this with my "women in science" post about resources I have found, but I think I need to spend some time just writing about where I am.

Physically, I am sitting at my desk (one of four) in my new office. No one else is here yet-- there is one PhD student who's been in this room for a couple of years, but the other three of us are new, and I'm the only one who's already here, since I worked here over the summer. I have two plants on the windowsill next to me, one is an aloe I adopted from my lab at IIHR/Iowa Flood Center, after a colleague and I discovered it had been abandoned and then repotted and revived it. The other is a little succulent I bought in Cedarburg, Wisconsin last weekend where I saw a group of old friends.
My very own filing cabinet is in front of my desk, and on it facing me are maps/diagrams of the Landform Regions of Iowa, the Stratigraphic Column of Iowa, and a Bedrock Geologic Map of Iowa. These came from a stand upstairs-- we share our building with the Iowa Geological Survey. My very own bookcase is behind my left shoulder. Right now it only has six books in it-- two books about Iowa by Cornelia Mutel, Wetlands, Wetland Ecosystems, Soils: Genesis and Geomorphology, and my adviser's copy of Benchmark Papers in Hydrology: Riparian Zone Hydrology and Biogeochemistry. It will fill up soon.

Mine is one of four offices in "The Maze" in the basement of Trowbridge hall. We have a kitchenette and table in the space the office doors open off of. There's a coffee pot and an electric kettle on the counter, and a dozen or so copies each of the "Journal of Paleontology" and the "Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology" on top of the cabinets.

I am reading papers about nutrient cycles on agricultural watersheds-- mostly nitrogen fertilizer, where it comes from and where it goes. I have done a lot of reading this summer and have a really good start on building my intellectual understanding of all the pieces involved in this. I have also done a lot of insecurity this summer. I keep having golden moments of seeing a part of all the interconnected systems that affect a watershed and its hydrologic and nutrient cycles, and then coming back the next day, or the next hour, or after blinking, apparently, and feeling lost. I know that most of this is a mental thing that I do, where I don't think I'm good enough or smart enough or whatever-enough and freak myself out and undermine some key part of my mind. Clearly I also am just not able or expected to understand everything, but I am finding that just being here in the office and letting myself look through things that I've read and notes that I've taken, I have made a lot of progress towards a thesis topic/question. I will post more about that--hopefully soon-- once I've processed just a bit more. Related to this, though, I have been trying to say the words "I am a scientist" out loud as often as possible, to convince myself.

Classes start next week at the University of Iowa, and I am super excited. I am taking a Wetlands class that I waited YEARS for as an undergrad, only to have its normal offering canceled during my last year here--there is only one professor emeritus who teaches it, so it is not offered very often, and having it offered my first semester of grad school feels like a smile from the Universe. I'm also taking Soils and Hydrology, both of which come as highly recommended courses from highly recommended professors, so it's just going to be a good semester all around.