I'm not really sure what compelled me to start a blog based solely around my life as a PhD student except to say that I wanted a record of whatever stories I had to share later on down the road. These could be boring, such as the mundane details of the commute I make, or they could be more along the lines of that time I took a class field trip into Chinatown, NY to see hookers, pimps, illegal immigrants, and the whereabouts of well known gambling dens. Whatever the case, what you see is what you get.
I'm a PhD student at Rutgers, Newark in their criminal justice program. I like to call it criminology, however, because that conveys what I'm actually studying a bit better; the nature and theories of the origins, processes, and impact of crime. When I tell people that I'm studying criminal justice, I almost universally get, "So you're going to be a lawyer?" No, if I was going to be a lawyer, I'd be studying law. Law. Lawyer. Do you see-? Never mind. It's just so much easier to say, "criminology," because then all I get is, "Oh, what's that?" and I actually get to explain myself. Occasionally I'll get people that think that means something about forensics and I get to have a conversation about NCIS, Bones, or a number of other forensics shows before I want to break something.
See, I want to be a professor, which still makes me laugh because even at 25 I barely think of myself as an adult. I really do like teaching and I think I would be very happy making the world a smarter, more informed place. I'm fascinated by criminology and its intersection between quantitative research and qualitative social concepts. Before criminology, I was on the way to becoming a communication sciences graduate student, so I think I'm better off now.
Anyway, I go to school in Newark, NJ, which is quite possibly the crappiest city ever, and I commute from Lansdale, PA, which is a strange town in and of itself. Two or three times a week, depending on the semester, I wake up in the morning, drive about an hour and fifteen minutes up to Somerville, NJ, get on the regional rail to Newark Penn Station, take the light rail to Washington St., and then walk a few blocks from there to campus. Don't ask me why I don't live closer; if you've seen Newark you know that it's not really worth living any closer to that place than is absolutely necessary. If you Google "worst places to live" it autofills to "worst places to live in New Jersey" and the top result is an article about how shitty Newark is. Thanks, Google.
Once I actually get to class, I sit through a lecture or two, each about two hours long and maybe with an hour break in between classes, and then I make that same trip in reverse. On some days, I spend about 13 hours away from my apartment for just under four hours of class. Yeah, it sucks, but it's better than living farther away and making routine trips back to this area to see my girlfriend, doctor, sister, friends, and Philadelphia, right?
So that's really the back story. Classes start up again next week with an exciting semester packed with a night time intermediate statistics class, research methods, a white collar crime course, and a law class. Mass Effect 2 for PS3 comes out next Tuesday and Amazon.com should get it to me in 48 hours or less. I'll give you three guesses which one I'm looking forward to more and yes, there are only two choices.
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