Thoughts after your first year in the PhD? (2015 Fall admits)

[tingdeh]

To my fellow 2015 Fall admits: I notice that our thread for the "lessons learned" in our application season is pretty much stickied (and bumped). So it's been one heck of a year. I'd love to hear about everyone's experiences. Did Freshman Fifteen rear its ugly head again? Did you find yourself more dependent on your bike (as many colleagues in the University of Michigan can attest)? Tell all! 

I'll start. It's been one heck of a productive year, finishing digital projects, and getting my first book review and peer-reviewed article published. On top of that, getting to manage a journal and organize a conference. It was a great time to have done my first year in my particular institution.

But then the crash-and-burns. Truly, until three weeks ago, I haven't taken a proper break for six months straight. Probably work-a-holic'd myself to pure exhaustion, that one day my girlfriend came home to me having fallen asleep behind the front door, in the process of taking off my shoes.

And just when you think life was done with that slap in the face, the archives singe away at every ounce of scholarly ego you've got left. I remember coming in with these fresh, bright ideas into the month-long trip, and then coming out being swept away by the messiness of the past, and being taken into rabbit holes I never knew existed. But that was the best part. I never was a history major in undergrad (and I never did a masters), so even this second archival trip (the first one was last summer) was a completely novel experience, discovering stories and directions I never knew existed, despite being rather familiar with the relevant literature. 

Tl;dr: did dope sh*it, got exhausted from doing too much of it, then discovered the wonderful ebbs and flows of being a historian.