Grad school and last night

**Edit: omg... i need to stop writing the moment I wake up... grammatical errors galore**

Perhaps I had a little too much coffee last night because it took me a long time to fall asleep. Most of the time I was thinking about how to build the new odaiko stand.

This post is going to seem a little eclectic, but most dream states tend to be that way anyways... it all started with the end of my last final.

I had gotten out of a 2.5 hour long final of which my mentor had randomly proctored. I hailed him as I had been avoiding the lab for quite a number of weeks. We ended up stepping outside to talk for a whopping 20 minutes. We talked about a number of things, including my future and how after I get back from Japan I was going to unleash myself upon the industry. He asked why I didn't want to go straight into grad school... and while I've thought about it for a long while, I just don't think I'm really grad school material. Throughout our conversation, my professor certainly laid on the hard sale. He was quite convincing in his arguments as most of my career plans involve some sort of in depth knowledge on the workings of the world... which require a phd.

I have two main issues in terms of grad school. First and foremost is the field. I have no freaking idea what field I want to be in. All I know is it will involve some sort of science and engineering. But thats SO BROAD. I've touched a lot of subjects during my stay at UCSD: Oceanography, Theoretical Physics, Material Science and Semiconductor Fabrication... I haven't really had any issues with any of them and I had a lot of fun getting my hands and mind dirty doing all that work, but its fairly obvious that the three put together don't really amount to a single coherent study.

The other reason is that my grades just aren't good enough. I'm a B+ student through and through... which essentially makes me a C+ student in the book of graduate studies... I'm not exactly one to strive for excellence. If there are better more beneficial options (for whatever reasons... ie. fun, work, career... all that whatnot) than being a bookworm, I'll take it. And what's worse, I don't really relate to my peers all that well, most of my closest relations have been through the arts. I don't know why, it just kind of works out that way for me. How that's going to play out in my professional life... we'll find out. Although I am decent at keeping professional and personal life separate so it shouldn't be that bag of a deal. Finally, I'm just not ready for graduate school. After 18 straight years of school, I'm tired of applications, and applying myself to my studies, and I have yet to take the GRE... so all in all... it just ain't happening this year.

Now to the dream. With all this background i kind of lost a lot of the dream. It starts off somewhere along the lines of getting work done at the lab when I somehow happen across a terminal and Dr. Driscoll is chatting with me on it. He tells me to login to some physics server so we could speak better... but I can't do it so he somehow ends up in the lab, right next to me and we talk face to face, I don't think much of it... but hey, its a dream; shit like this happens. One needs to keep in mind, I've never worked with this guy. Professor Driscoll is a colleague of my physics mentor Dan Arovas. I've talked to Driscoll on one occasion because I've heard about him from my own physics peers, and amazingly enough he remembers who I am from one encounter on library walk when I was tabling for Taiko... Arovas works in Theoretical physics, Driscol in Experimental physics. So we get to talking... what about? grad school... Great... we go through all the arguments. And basically he convinces me... yet once again.. that I should just make the plunge. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! WTF, I can't even get away from this in my dreams. Then I slowly come back to reality as one of the parents drops off their kid at my place.

Maybe heavens are telling me to talk to Driscoll, or atleast dropping one helluva strong hint that I should apply for grad school. He's going to find it pretty rich when I tell him that he convinced me to seriously reconsider grad school in a dream. One thing that my dream state made me realize though... is that if there's anyone that would be able to help me consolidate this discrepancy in my fields of choice, it'd probably be him. Its obvious that I'm multi-disciplinary in nature... just how much so and how that can be implemented into a coherent graduate studies regimen is... well I really have no idea... time to get help I guess.

**and now that I'm done editing, time to go back to sleep... good night ladies and gents**