Inauspicious Introductions?

1. First on-campus homicide occurred last Saturday. V. surreal. Off-the-cuff, it sounded like a DV situation, but, as always, the truth came out. It was quite a bit more sad and preventable than expected. That it happened during the first few weeks many new grad students would be moving on campus, and the weekend before the undergrads arrived, well, see title of post.

2. First day of classes is scheduled for a system-wide faculty (and grad employee) walkout. It's one thing for strikes to begin mid-year, another for it to be, again, a first introduction to university culture, or a particular university's culture. The university itself is an island of liberalism that stands in high contrast to the surrounding communities, which, while increasingly international in terms of represented cultures (Middle Eastern, Eastern European, South Asian, and East Asian, in addition to the WASP contingent), still consists of the largely conservative higher income brackets. Oh, and the buildings don't match each other the way the rest of the local architecture tends to do.

So, between the two, I expect a slightly more surreal start back to school than I'd anticipated. Oh, and I've confirmed that I really am older than most of the current Ph.D. students, not just the incoming ones. OTOH, my favorite TA from my undergrad years was probably the same age as I am now, or a little older, when she left her teaching position with a large local school district to start working on her Ph.D. Still, I think she's gone on to a career as a skydiving instructor, not a tenure-track academic, though there's probably a lot of personal reasons for this.