One-upsmanship

Earlier this week I wrote about my friend G, who is now a tenure-track faculty member. As such, he got a goodie bag with all sorts of useless paraphernalia, while I can't even get a grading program installed on my computer. It's actually very comical in a Dilbert sort of way.

However, I got one up on G the other day. The department had a reception for new and transfer students. Dr. R, who always looks out for the grad students, made sure to tell us about it so at least we'd get fed before class. It ended up that I was the only 2nd year grad student to show up, but then again I was waiting for the start of my Thursday night class and studying for the quiz I was going to have in there.

It also turned out that I was the only person there who taught any of the PR courses. However there were a lot of students there who wanted to major in PR. For the short time I was there, I was kept pretty busy talking to students.

G was there as well, but no one wanted to talk to him. I looked over at him a couple of times and he was just standing there. If other teachers started talking to him, like myself or one of the electronic media guys, the academic advisor would send students towards us so we would interact with them instead of each other. Generally the students were either interested in electronic media or PR, leaving G standing by himself.

G teaches an upper-level comm law course that all journalism/mass comm majors are required to take. More than likely students will have him at some point during their studies here and I think his students like him. But let's face it, to most incoming freshmen or transfer students, comm law just sounds boring. PR, on the other hand, sounds fun and exciting (little do they know the truth).

While G got the university coffee mug and the paperweight, I actually had the attention of the students. I was Miss Popularity that evening. I just keep thinking how much better it would have been if I hadn't had to keep one eye on the clock and wasn't thinking about the quiz I had at 6:30.