Eastern Illinois University.

[wildebeest]

Nearing the end of my first semester. I managed to find a good balance for time spent between school, work, and kids, and found a good rhythm within the semester, so I've enjoyed the last two months quite a bit. While I've liked my public policy classes, I think the budgeting and financial management course has been my favorite. While there are absolutely practical applications for every course I'm currently doing, this one feels the most useful in real-world situations. 

This week, since there's no school, I'm working on a final paper I have due on December 9. It's for the public policy research and analysis class and is the only final I have that is independent of the rest of the work we've done this semester. That is, for the other two classes, I can essentially combine assignments into the final. For this class, I'm writing a 25-page paper from scratch. 

Anyway, happy to be wrapping up my first semester, and have my next semester planned: Public Policy and Grant Writing in Human Services, Proseminar in Public Administration, and Health Politics and Policy. The grant writing class is technically outside my major (an HSL rather than a PLS course), but I wanted to take a grant writing class, found one in a different program, and got approval (which involved exactly two emails and an online application). Repeating myself, but I really like this school, how involved the professors are, and how easy it is to navigate the system (their football team, however, has been a bit of a disappointment).