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Student Voices

A Ph.D. Fireside Chat

The following is a transcript of a Gmail chat between Mike, a student blogger and Ph.D. Student in Kinesiology and Natalie Bartolacci, Academic Program Officer at Rackham Graduate School. For the record, the Gmail chat was not conducted fireside, but the warm imagery...

Being International in a Global Town

The first few times I was asked “How’re you doing,” I would stop in my tracks, feel pleased about how interested in my life this kind person was, take a few seconds to gather my thoughts, start a monologue about my health and happiness and promptly come to a halt when...

How to be everything

If you get as busy as the church of Agia Foteini, you, too, can be everything! Disclaimer: I am not everything, nor do I have a job yet. I, like most graduate students I know in the humanities, feel the beginnings of an anxiety attack whenever I think about future...

Why Am I Here?

So, proud that I’ve survived the first semester in my program, I can now admit that there were times that Impostor Syndrome had me doubting both my place and my purpose in working toward a Ph.D. The last time I asked myself the question ‘Why am I here?’ this is what I...

‘Tis the Season – Musings on Grant-Writing

‘Tis the season: writing 300-word summaries of our research and pestering our professors for references, all in the hopes of getting a grant for the next academic year. I know that for more senior students – and professors with stacks of reference requests! – it can...

Lunchtime Nuggets

Every once in a while, my department invites students to have a lunch session with an invited speaker, who is either a member of the faculty at an external institution or a faculty candidate (this is also, as far as I know, true of other departments in the biomedical...

Meet Our Bloggers: Elina Salminen

The Parthenon. Greetings from Athens! As the picture has hopefully clued you in, I am in Athens, Greece – not Georgia. How did I end up from Ann Arbor to Athens? In a way, it is a return home; in other ways, an adventure. I was born in Finland, somewhere in the center...

A Guide to Moving Cross Country

Moving cross country is a very singular experience. Typically there are two paths that one can take. They can choose to pack up everything they have and find a way to get it to their new destination. Generally this plan takes a good amount of money for moving trucks...