Day 193

I have officially decided that I cannot be trusted to blog regularly without making myself do it every day, so my daily posts are back for the foreseeable future. That means that I'll have some good blog posts and some questionable ones, but content of varying quality and quantity will be coming daily for at least 92 more days. I do have a post in progress about my 100K that I hope to wrap up soon, but this week has been absolutely full of school stuff that I didn't do while I was away, so it'll be at least this weekend before I finish that.

After writing last night about my obsession with the SAT back in 2005, I read the first four chapters of SAT Wars: The Case for Test-Optional Admissions tonight (in preparation for class tomorrow), and that was interesting, to say the least. Based only on people I know in real life, I was aware that there were many people in the world who were against standardized testing as a college admission requirement, and there is indeed some pretty compelling evidence that tests such as the SAT don't tell us what we expect them to tell us with respect to predictions and ability. There's also the argument that standardized tests don't tell us much that isn't already somewhere else in a college application packet, which I guess I never really considered. I just obsessed about the test and took it because that's the status quo. We read College Admissions & the Public Interest by B. Alden Thresher last week, and one of his points is that students who want to go to college pretty much have to deal with the "system" of admissions as it stands, including defects, injustices, and illogicalities. ("Illogicalities" is Thresher's word, not mine, but I'll be using it in the future.) I was definitely part of the system.

In the midst of being totally perplexed by the complexities of university enrollment management, I am also quite amazed at what I have learned of the field so far. Part of me wonders if it's an area I should explore professionally, but the other part wants to head in the opposite direction and only be involved with enrollment management insofar as "Enrollment management is everyone's job." Even though I'm tired much of the time, I am so thankful to be where I am and have the opportunity to learn all of the things I'm learning. My ongoing goal is to maintain this gratefulness as I get deeper into Ph.D. life.

Something that made today great: I checked several items off of my "To Do" list today by
Time I woke up: 5:30-ish to take Richard to work, but I went back to sleep and awoke again around 9:00.