Classes Begin

Yesterday I started my graduate level classes. I haven't had to do too many things for hours at a stretch this summer, so taking three multi-hour classes in a day was a bit draining for me. I am sure I will get used to it once I get in the swing of things, it's just that I now know that the entirety of my Tuesdays from here until December will be completely spoken for.

Here's a quick rundown of my classes:

Economic Applications in Urban Studies: This course name is rather lengthy, but it's really a fancy way of saying Urban Economics, or Urban Economics for planners. I like the professor so far, Greg Schrock, and it appears that he definitely understands how economics and planning may sometimes seem diametrically opposed, but must be appropriately balanced in practice. I may have had enough economics background to waive the requirement for this class. Freeing up space in my schedule would have been nice, but I think that I will enjoy this class and am glad that I get to take it. Economics and its cold rationality and penchant for pushing market solutions to problems provides a nice balance to planning, which can sometimes get impractical with its squishy utopian ideals.

After Econ I had about five hours between classes, so I elected to work up in the office for a few hours making phone calls to prospective families for the Family Activity Study. I wasn't nearly as successful as I have been in the past in making recruitments, but I did well enough.

Planning Methods I: This class appears that it will also be numbers based, with a focus on how to obtain data in order to better inform planning. Our class project, an in depth study of the active transportation needs of East Portland, will carry over through next term into Planning Methods II. To be more specific, we are looking at the large swath of Portland east of I-205 that was annexed in the 80's and 90's. It's a geographically large area, and much different than the dense closer in neighborhoods that people normally associate with Portland. To be honest it's not really an area that I would care much for living in, but that doesn't take away from this being a great opportunity for us to hopefully provide useful data to help improve it.

History & Theory of Planning: It was about this point that classroom fatigue had started to set in. I had already been at school for about 8 hours, and only had a 10 minute break between Methods and this course. Our professor, Sy Adler, or just Sy, lectures more traditionally from his own notes rather than powerpoint. He jumped right into things and we were learning the vast majority of the class period. I had thought that this class might be a little repetitive for me since I had had prior planning classes, however this will not be the case. The way he presented things and way he wanted us to consider and think about things is much more of a thoughtful exercise then anything I encountered in my undergraduate planning classes. My previous classes were just a straightforward presentation of history, facts and things that occurred, whereas this lecture focused much more on how and why things should occur.

After about 2.5 hours straight of lecturing he broke us off into groups by specialty with the intent of us forming smaller groups of 4-5 people with a recently implement plan that we were to focus on. There are 14 people in the transportation focus, which meant it took us much longer to identify plans that people were interested in, and then paring down the interested people into groups that were small enough to meet the Sy's requirement. The first group to organize was, no surprise, for the Bicycle 2030 Master Plan. A little while later, a few of us drew numbers from a hat to see who could be in the Portland Streetcar Plan group, which I luckily made the cut.

Of all of my classes, the last one probably concerned me the most in terms of workload. This may have to do with my fatigue at having been at school all day, or possibly because of how oddly the syllabus was organized. Still, I have only have three classes to worry about, so that's certainly less to juggle mentally then back when I had five or even six classes a semester.

New job skills on the research assistant front

My GRA thus far has largely consisted of distributing flyers in target neighborhoods throughout Portland and calling prospective families that have indicated they are interested in participating in the Family Activity Study. Neither one is particularly glamorous, but I understand that this sort of leg work is necessary to facilitate what will hopefully be helpful findings once all of the data is processed. I find it a little ironic that I am not much of a salesman, nor am I terribly extroverted, yet in the log of contact with prospective families, I record a lot more contacts and conversations in a setting then my colleagues do. I suspect that the others don't really care as much for working the phones, after all many of the participants have tricky questions, or else have odd situations where a judgment call is necessary to determine if they are still eligible for the study. There's also the matter of scheduling a drop off and pick up of our equipment with them that doesn't conflict with any of the deliverers schedules, yet be close in enough that we are keeping our equipment out in the field as much as possible.

Today I learned a little about the process of mailing off gift cards as a reward to families that completed the study. We determine the amount of gift cards based upon how much useful data we received and how good they were about wearing both their accelerometers and GPS units. Anyway, there's tight control over the gift cards so as none go missing, and we also have to get signatures on a thank you letter from Jennifer Dill, the professor at Portland State that's ultimately overseeing this research. Anyway, processing gift cards is a rather bureaucratic process because of all this leg work involved and we didn't go through nearly as many households as I would have thought for how long we worked on it. Oh and people in Portland love them some Fred Meyer gift cards; they are by far and away more popular than the gift cards for New Seasons, Burgerville and Target.

I am getting comfortable with several of the other Master's and PhD students involved in the research. I won't have too many classes with these people since I have to take the first year core courses, and most of them are second year Master's students or else PhD students that aren't actively taking classes. On Thursday I will have my orientation and get to meet more of my cohort and of course learn more about the curriculum. There's a happy hour right after the orientation that I intend on going to and perhaps work on making some good acquaintances. I have had to remind myself that despite having gotten into the groove of being a research assistant, which I like very much, I will be a student first come next week and have to juggle both responsibilities.

First day on the job

Today was my first day actually working for Portland State. I met with a few other graduate students at SE 43rd and Raymond to flyer a neighborhood. The purpose of the flyers is to recruit families into the Family Activity Study research that is being funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. On a map it doesn't look like we covered a huge area, maybe 20 square blocks, but considering that we went to all but a few houses, there was quite a bit of walking. It was somewhat similar to my previous experience with canvassing for politician's campaign - with the major exception being that our goal was to not directly engage people. With this study it would take awhile to explain to each family what the study was about and what we are trying to do.

Time to move up to Portland

Labor Day seemed to mark the unofficial end of summer as I am now packing up to move to Portland. I spent this summer living in Eugene with my girlfriend Annie, and will check into our new apartment tomorrow afternoon. After looking at numerous apartments, we found one in a mixed-use building at the eastern edge of Hawthorne and within walking distance of Mt. Tabor. I will be going by myself tomorrow to unload a carload of our belongings and will then pick up a Wells Cargo trailer from my Uncle Milo in Clackamas so that Annie and I can use it for the furniture. We should do the bulk of the moving on Thursday, and hopefully focus on unpacking Friday.

Our apartment and overall location is a good fit for Annie and I. We were initially drawn to Northwest Portland, but higher overall costs made it just a little too expensive to live there at this juncture. Our neighborhood has plenty to offer and we are within walking distance of several local restaurants, coffee shops, a Fred Meyer, a New Seasons (think Whole Foods), and of course bars. I will take advantage of the bus stop that's just steps outside of the apartment and purchase a transit pass so that I won't have to mess with parking downtown when I need to go to class. This is exciting for me since while I have been a big advocate of mass transit and transit systems in general, I have typically only used them when touring major cities such as New York or Washington DC, but never routinely relied upon them.

I have been on the Family Activity Study mailing list for a few weeks and frequently have gotten messages about members of the research group flyering in various neighborhoods of Portland. I should get a few chances next week to roll up my sleeves and finally get involved in the project, meet some of my fellow researchers and classmates, and of course, make a little money. I know I am up to the task, although it's a little daunting knowing that from the emails that I am about the only person who hasn't been active yet.

On the not so exciting front in graduate school is the matter of paying for it. I still haven't received my Graduate Research Assistantship (GRA) letter, and it's not entirely clear to me how many credits my tuition waiver will cover for each term. The other part of the how to pay for school equation is my GI Bill benefits. Portland State is a little different than CCSU was in that they require me to have a course listing sheet filled out and signed by my advisor each term, plus I have to give the Veteran's Office a copy of a paper form that I actually filed online. It seems rather behind the times, particularly when I was able to submit everything for CCSU electronically. As with any sort of payment for the government, I know I will get my benefits eventually and that in the meantime I will have to lean upon what I have in savings to help bridge the gap.