First Semester Down! 3 to go!

Well......I've finished my first semester in graduate school. I am SO glad its over, however, some good things did come from it. I've become very good friends with several professors that I think will be great resources for me in the future. Recently, I finished a 22 page paper for one of my archaeology classes. The paper was read aloud, which made me very nervous. After my adviser read the paper, he suggested that I change that paper topic into my thesis. I'll explain that in a bit.

I've really started to like living in Texas. The people are great, the food is wonderful (Steak is WAY better in Texas), and there are plenty of things to do and see. Some of the smaller towns nearby are so nice. New Braunfels is one of them. he downtown area reminds me of some small German villages. Maybe that's because its German. They even have a Weinnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) there and things are labeled in German. Pretty neat-O.

My two jobs have become more and more interesting as the year has progressed. The Alumni Association has put there full trust in me with their website. We are in a transitional phase of the site right now, moving from one back-end web provider to another one. When I first started working there, the site was VERY archaic and we got weekly complaints about it. Now we have a new temporary site while we negotiate terms with our current provider. There are still lots and lots and LOTS of problems with it, but at least it looks updated. I wish I could spend more time working on it. Here is the site.

The other site I work on is Texas Beyond History. Here it is if you'd like to see it.
This is a HUGE website that a good friend of mine, Dr. Stephen Black, has set up as a virtual museum of Texas archaeology. The exhibit I am working on isn't up yet but it is called "Mission Dolores". It is a Spanish Mission that was set up when the Spanish ruled Texas in the 1600s and 1700s. The research is interesting and I get to work with a lot of old documents and interesting journals about the subject.

So my thesis topic has been narrowed down to the subject of Mayan Hieroglyphics. I had first planned on working with Mayan burials, but I was told that subject has been "done to death" ha ha ha. So the paper that I mentioned was on a group of symbols called the "Initial Series Introductory Glyph" or ISIG for short. These symbols are grouped together before calendar dates on monuments and nearly anything with a date called the Long Count date. Not a lot of work has been done on these symbols and my adviser was so impressed with my subject that he told me on the spot that this was gonna be my new thesis topic. I've received a few emails from other professors at other schools around the country telling me that this is research that has been needed for a while but no one has done it before. I hope I am up to the task.

My professors at ECU were certainly happy to hear about my thesis an the direction I am going. Without them, who knows what I'd be doing now. It was nice getting to see them all again at my late graduation. I actually was on the list of graduates in May 2009 but couldn't walk because I was in Germany. So I was told I should come and do the graduation this Dec. I'm so glad that I did. I talked to so many professors about my current work and about Texas State. That is Dr. Laura Mazow and myself. She always encouraged me to go into epigraphy and so far it seems like that is the field I belong in. It was GREAT getting to tell them how much of an impact they made on my career decisions.