Did a little more research, and it appears that my trip to Prague might be kind of difficult, but it's not going to be impossible. I've been trying to find other spots where I could also go, but unfortunately, I'm kind of stuck in the problem of being a graduate student, so I have to choose only the programs that I can do as a PhD student. That's part of why I really wanted to go to Prague; Dr. Butterfield wrote back and stated that it is a class that can be offered at the 700 level, so I'm going to be able to take it. It looks like Arus, one of the other graduate students with me at Western is also interested in going. I figure Dr. Butterfield is probably going to assign a bunch of stuff to be read before appearing, and I think I kind of like that because it will at least give me something to do before heading for the summer part of my education.

Paying for it is going to kind of suck because it appears to be requiring me to pay for it out of Summer II budget rather than Summer I budget, and my assistantship ends during Summer I, so I might have to live off of ramen all next year as a result of this. I've already mentioned a number of times that my assistantship ends and isn't going to be renewed. I don't know what my chances are of picking up an associateship through my department, but I tried the year before and it didn't happen. Of course, who knows how things will be this year?

Finally finished the reading I had to do for my Congress class. The reading I did is part of the reason I'm no longer as interested in being an Americanist anymore. It's all about conclusions that appear to be conclusions that had already been made so many times before. Unfortunately, I don't see the usage of the information that I would be doing research on in this particular subfield. I might see some congressman taking advantage of the information, but I'm not exactly sure that it advances human knowledge any in being able to explain that congressmen have the sole desire to be re-elected. At least with comparative, I can see avenues to explore that might be of a much greater nature, and if I am successful in this transition, I think it might be the direction in which I really need to take.

I figured out my topic for my Teaching Excellence course, and I'm going to do a research subject involving the importance of coaching as a method of teaching in academic competition. My end goal is to try to get the paper published in the National Forensics Journal as well as turn it in for a grade. My paper I'm going to be writing in my congress class seems to be concerning the subject of how influential public opinion was on breaking the trend of loss of House seats for the presidential party during presidential midterm elections. I just hope that the NES studies will be available for 2002 in time for me to actually put this paper together.

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