Alex Krogh-Grabbe

On Saturday I went on a tour of Boston focused on environmental justice with other UEP first-years. One of the second-years who organized the tour wrote about it on the UEP blog here. I was tired and hungry throughout the tour, but it was an eye-opening experience. I went on the East Boston part of the tour, and seeing the redeveloped (and not) housing projects was something I’d never done before. It’s useful to get out and see on-the-ground impacts of good and bad planning, to deepen the education you get at a university-on-the-hill. It seems my program is aware of that, which I am glad of.

Tomorrow classes begin! My classes consist of three core courses and one elective. The three cores are “Cities in Space, Place, and Time” (a history of cities, which I have tomorrow afternoon), “Foundations of Policy & Planning”, and “Economics for Policy & Planning”. I would like my elective to be “Developing Sustainable Communities”, but I am on the waitlist and I am unsure whether or not I will be able to take it. The contingency plan is to take “Social Welfare Policy”, which also meets on Tuesdays.

This afternoon I’m going bike shopping! And my housemate, a German economics post-doc at Harvard Kennedy School, just moved in, so it’s nice getting to know him as well. I hope your Labor Day is relaxing and helps you decrease your stress load as we enter the autumn.

Yesterday I moved to Cambridge, to start grad school and live on my own for the first time. I’m not too worried, but it’s exhilarating and frightening. I will have a lot of reading to do, once classes start on Tuesday. But the moving process was efficient and exciting and everything went according to plan.

My dad drove me with all my stuff from Amherst to Cambridge, where we arrived around 10:30am. We hit some heavy traffic on Route 2 in Concord, so we turned off to take smaller roads through Lincoln and Belmont. There was no traffic on those roads, it was much prettier, and we got the desperately needed bathroom break as well! Good decision.

I couldn’t move into my apartment until the evening, so I had gotten a friend’s permission to stash my stuff in her apartment during the day. I found her place, stored my stuff, and moved it out again without a hitch.

During the afternoon, I went to the matriculation ceremony, which was one of the best assemblies I’ve ever been to. All of the administrative speakers (especially Tufts President Larry Bacow) were interesting, informal, and devoid of the condescension that is so frustrating about high school and undergraduate mandatory auditorium events. I high-tailed it from the event to run two errands. First, I wanted to check whether I could still get a discounted MBTA semester pass. I found the right person to ask, but unfortunately I missed the MBTA-imposed deadline. Then I went to University Police in order to get my ID. Due to poor phrasing on the graduate student orientation materials, it had seemed like Tuesday was a fine time to do this, but the “Campus Po-Po” (as we sometimes called them at Conn) had not planned for the rush and were stressed out. After a little while, the one guy running the ID booth walked out and told the assembled queue that we’d have to come back tomorrow or the next day, when they had planned to dispense the IDs. The crowd mostly dispersed, but I lingered with a few people, and another Police dude gave us the non-stressed-out version of that ultimatum: they needed to move the cameras and printer, but if we’d uploaded pictures already he could print out IDs from a different printer. I thanked him. Unfortunately, though, I had an addition ID snafu. Because I’d been working for my department over the summer, apparently I was still in the system as a “Non-Tufts Hourly Student Employee” instead of a graduate student, so that’s what printed on my ID card (though “employee” got cut off). The nice Police man didn’t know how to rectify the problem in the database, though, so he advised I hold onto this ID for now and return for a new one next week after the rush had subsided.

Aside from those adventures, it’s been a quiet spell of purchasing necessary items (Seventh Generation products FTW!…that’s “for the win” to you older readers. Just pretend I said “are great!”) and acclimatizing. The 98 degree weather doesn’t help, but it’s summer and that’s the way the temperature should be occasionally. This morning I tried out my new routine of wake-run-shower-breakfast-tea. I’m excited about that, though I think I will switch breakfast and shower temporarily to give myself time to stop sweating before I shower.

Finally, I would like to keep posting here on a once-a-week schedule, but I’m not sure whether I will have time for that or not. I’m optimistic, but I am going to have a lot of reading to do, and I am not a fast reader. So I hope you’ve enjoyed what I’ve written thus far, and I hope that you enjoy what I continue to write just as much!