One Down, Five or Six To Go...

Yes, the first semester of the doctoral program is done! While it ended with an intense level of stress, I made it through unscathed. This past week and a half/ two weeks, I was a bundle of paper writing nerves. My wonderful wife of 13 years was an amazing support through this time.
First, we had to construct a Personal Leadership Development Plan (PLDP) for our personal leadership class. We were provided with a series of questions that would outline our paper based on our personal thoughts/ideas AND the theories covered in class and how we will apply them to our own lives. No page limit.
My PLDP was long at 20 pages, but I felt like it was a good honest representation of what I have learned about myself over the last semester and goals that I am setting for the future (which was probably the best part of writing that paper).
The second major assignment was a research paper applying a theory learned in class to a topic of our own selection. I focused on using Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman and applying to veterinarians' behavior in the exam room. I did weeks of research on the topic and ended up realizing that applying emotional intelligence to veterinarians in the exam room is more of a dissertation topic than a simple research paper. I managed to pull off the paper, but did a disservice to the depth of research that COULD be done in this area!
The final challenging part of this last week we had to write a 10, oh strike that, 5 page paper in class. Thank goodness the prof cut it to 5 pages, because in 2 hours most of us BARELY got it done. Although after talking with the prof after submitting the paper, she was expecting less from us than we were expecting of ourselves. I personally cited four different works to address the question. She was only looking for a review of ONE work - well that would have been easier!
Anyway, it is over and now my role is to rest for two weeks (yep, that is all we get off) and clean up my desk area, which looks like a paper mill blew up!
Thanks for hanging with me on this first semester journey, next semester looks like it will definitely be interesting - stay tuned!