new house, new job, more school
This is a blog post of MANY UPDATES! It’s also my twentieth post overall on my site! 🎉
As some of you may know, Taylor and I have been planning to buy a home in Baltimore for a while. We started taking RedFin tours back in September, just to get a sense of what’s out there. Since Taylor works in DC, we needed to find a place that was really close to the train station. In December, a recently-renovated house RIGHT ACROSS from Penn Station became available. Taylor and I toured it twice, and luckily enough, it was still available this month. We made an offer through RedFin, and are more than halfway done with the closing process.
Please enjoy the below photos I took earlier today for a reference of the house layout:
(Unfortunately, furniture is not ours, but I hope to design the home in a similar fashion bc its #goals)
The house has four bedrooms and three bathrooms. It’s more than three times the size of our current apartment, so we’ll definitely be making a few IKEA trips over the next few months to fill the space! My favourite part is that the third floor has a master bedroom, bath, and sitting area. So cute! Baltimore has quickly come to be one of my favourite cities, and I’m THRILLED to be moving there so soon!
We had been waiting to make a decision on housing until I heard back about my graduate school applications. Unfortunately, this month I was rejected from three out of the five schools I applied to. As such, I decided to start looking for alternative paths. Fortunately, I found a program called Urban Teachers that is a perfect fit. I applied a few weeks ago and received an offer only 10 days later! Even though I’m still waiting on a few application decisions, I decided to go ahead and accept.
Urban Teachers is a teaching residency program with a four-year commitment. The first year involves a six-week summer training, followed by a year-long residency as a student teacher. After that, fellows become the teacher of record at a school for 3+ years. Along the way, fellows receive a Master of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) degree through Johns Hopkins University. Urban Teachers is a relatively new program, started 10 years ago in Baltimore. Since then, it’s expanded to DC and Dallas/Fort Worth. I’m really excited to be part of this program, and can’t wait until June!
Though I am a little disappointed at not entering a Doctoral program this fall, I still remain dedicated to exploring my research interests through Urban Teachers and beyond. I’m nearly done with my honors thesis which I will be presenting at Georgetown University Round Table later this month, and hope to submit my findings to academic journals over the course of the year. Having had some time to reflect, I think a few years of full-time teaching experience will enhance my research initiatives and academic work thus far. Plus, thanks to Urban Teachers’ partnership with Johns Hopkins, I’ll still be going to grad school after all… even if it’s not in the way I imagined.
These two big life updates have made it just a little hard to concentrate on the rest of my classes, but I’m doing my best to complete assignments and stay on task. It’s been busy though, and things aren’t going to slow down! Spring break starts tomorrow, and I’ll be going on the DC Education Immersion ABP trip. Then, for Easter break, Taylor and I will be going to Moscow! Only a few weeks after that comes graduation… my parents, one of my step-sisters, and some other relatives are flying in to town. See? So, so much happening!
2019 is looking to be a year of beginnings, endings, and so much Baltimore ;) (…Get it?)
P.S. Credit goes to Timothy Garcia for the featured blog photo of me + Taylor