I've been cohort-ed

Two days into my "plan" to write every day and I just spent a half an hour watching House Hunters instead.  I almost abandoned ship on this endeavor right when the episode ended in favor of an early bedtime.  Look at me making productive choices!

I made the all too familiar drive down to Pasadena today in what will be the first of many, many trips this school year.  Classes officially start for me on Tuesday, but there was a dinner for my cohort being hosted at my one of my favorite professor's homes tonight.  Free mediterranean food?  Sold.  I decided to head down, get a couple books I needed from the bookstore and participate in at least one of the many events being held during Orientation Week.

Due to the fact that I am a commuter student who has floated between two different masters programs at the same school, I've never quite been an integral member of the community that makes up Fuller's School of Psychology.  When I started, I wasn't able to make any of the orientation events and after that, it just felt silly to go to orientation being that I had already been a student for a while.  I've learned the ropes by observation and anything I wasn't able to figure out I simply bugged my adviser with.  Over the course of each quarter I've gotten to know some of the other students in my classes and met some great people, but for the most part when I am on campus I am a little machine of productivity.  I likely come across as some hyper-studious wallflower (which is funny to me) when really I am just excited to learn and willing to spend hours in the library cranking out homework so that when those SB weekends roll around I can hit the beach with my friends.  I'm not usually around for some of the other stuff - dinners, meetings, activities - that happens after classes are out, and it's never made much of a difference to me. 

I don't mind this, I've chosen to do graduate school this way.  But in the six quarters that I've been a student here my actual place in the school was in fact to be somewhat of a drifter.  I started in an odd quarter, with no cohort (a big deal here, apparently, so I've learned) and only a couple other people in the Family Studies program at all.  While I've been a student taking all the right classes for over a year, I am just now becoming a "legit" member of the MFT program and with that comes my placement in a cohort.  I will travel through the next two years with these people.  We'll learn a lot about each other and ourselves, practice doing therapy together, and grow into therapists alongside one another.

So tonight we shared a delicious meal at a beautiful home and I got to meet some of my fellow travelers on this journey.  Most of the students will be brand new to Fuller this fall, but there are others who are like me; seasoned Fuller students who are a little bit all over the place in how they got here but have arrived in this particular MFT cohort nonethless.  They, like me, have done things unconventionally but loved every minute of it.  Our professors took some time and shared their wisdom with us, prayed with us, made us play a couple of silly icebreakers, and let us get to know one another a little bit.  There were a few people with whom I hit it off immediately, and I am looking forward to getting to know them this year and having a little bit more fun on the days I spend down in Pasadena.

Man, I just love the beginning of a new school year.  New backpacks (or in my case a new leather tote) to fill with new books.  A new schedule and new classes filled with new faces and new things to learn.  Everyone is fresh and eager and optimistic.  I was sitting at the table this evening as our professors took turns offering us one piece each of wisdom for the beginning of this process.  I looked around at my new friends who will so quickly become familiar faces and listened to the kind and encouraging words of my mentors and was so filled with joy and contentment.  I feel like I am doing exactly what I was made to do.  I'm so thankful for the opportunity to study something I love and to be taught by people I respect.  I'm terrified and excited by the prospect of really truly beginning this year to actually become a therapist.  It was nice to kick off the school year with an intentional gathering, orienting us as a group to where we are headed together.  I officially became a member of this graduating class, and it felt significant.  I was cohort-ed, and I liked it.

Let the new classes begin!