Grateful for the beginning of other things.

It’s 2010, the unemployment rate is up, but I, Liann Seiter M.S., have a job. This path has been long and hard for me. This transition into post-collegiate life has been a challenge. I love being a student. I didn’t realize how much I love it until I found myself making cute little flashcards for the Foreign Service Officer exam. Silly me and my obsession with Back to School supplies at Target.

While I may be a bit remiss to leave behind my title as student, I am looking forward to start with my new title of Research Associate at American Institutes for Research. I have been temping there for a few months now, hoping to get an “in,” and well, now I’m in.

When I think about this job offer I have the same welling up of confusing and potent emotions I have when I think about graduating. I am so grateful my heart knows no other way to express it except push water out of my tear ducts.

I take that back, my heart did lead me to write out a stack of thank you cards to people who helped along the way: my parents, the people in the Field Studies office, and a few professors. I was even considering writing a card to God, making tangible the emotion that’s been filling my insides. I ran out of cards before I could write one to God. But I keep thinking of more people I want to thank: past roommates, old friends, fellow BYU grad students. I could not have made it through those years sane without them. So, maybe I’ll buy (or make) more cards and make physical evidence of the emotion which seems to be overflowing right now.

Grateful for the end of some things.

I recently got word that the Journal of Adolescent Research is going to publish the article version of my thesis (with me as the first author!). My little heart thumps loudly at the thought of all my work being printed in a big, fancy, peer-reviewed journal. Only people with letters after their names do things like that. Wait. I have letters after my name. In case you didn’t know my name is actually:

Liann Seiter M.S.

It even says so at the top of my resume (but only after a colleague suggested it). Before then is just read:

Liann Seiter

So much fancier with those extra letters eh?

In related news, I finally got around to calling BYU to get my diploma mailed to me—apparently there was a hold on my account because I had not turned in an ecclesiastical endorsement for fall semester. That honor code office, always keeping an eye out for my soul even as an alumni. Luckily I got that cleared up. I’m graduated and can have my boyfriend over as late as I want. But thanks to my 40 hour a week work schedule “as late as I want” usually means 11, sometimes 11:30.

I keep thinking that maybe when I get that fancy piece of paper this graduation thing will feel more real. But in all probability I will open that package, sit in the middle of my bedroom floor next to a pile of my laundry and cry.

There’s something about finishing such a hard thing that makes me want to cry. I don’t know quite how to explain it, but it’s something like this: I can emotionally revisit the pain of all those lonely months of working on my thesis, be happy that that damn paper is finished, feel grateful it was good enough to publish, and wallow a little in sadness because I won’t be able to sit around and shoot the intellectual breeze with my cohort in that little grad lab ever again.

I’m grateful. So grateful I don’t even know quite how to express it without a little rambling.