I will not have to pay any tuition or TA at UCSD!

I just found out from the UCSD Financial Aid office that they will give me a grant for $8145 over the next 2 quarters. I wrote them a letter 6 months ago saying that I was poor and couldn't afford to pay for school. It took them 6 months to review it in a meeting. Tuition is $4,200 per quarter, so that basically covers both quarters. I was only going to stay for one quarter before, but they would only give me half of the money. I may stay for 2 more quarters now because school is free and I really want to take some more classes on quantitative methods, game theory, and cost benefit analysis for fun. I will decide later if I want to stay for 1 or 2 more quarters.

In the past, I used to be a TA for 20 hours a week to pay for tuition, which limited which classes I could take and occupied too much of my time. Now I can focus more on classes, and take more classes than before. Now I don't have to be a TA to undergraduates. What I want to do is to get a RA (research assistant) job and do research for a famour political science professor (maybe Shirk), get co-published, and get into a good PhD program.

My office here in DC told me informally that they want me back next year. They have a great retirement program here: if I put in 4% of my salary, they match with another 9% of my salary for a total of 13%. I get to invest 13% of my salary into retirement by only putting in 4%! That is incredible. I'm applying for a lot of different jobs right now, some in government and others like Boston Consulting and Bloomberg Finance.

I helped my office organize "The National Maritime Strategy" conference these past 2 days. I spent time with 170 generals, admirals, and professors in political science and military strategy. I met a lot of people, including the president of the Navy War College, Navy Post-Graduate College. I also found out that the president of my company is a retired professor at Harvard Kennedy School, and my division director was a 4 star admiral. It was an exciting 2 days as the personal assistant to the Admiral, who was in charge of the conference. Whenever he had a problem, I solved it. He kept telling people how impressed he was that I could solve all of his problems. I also took extensive notes on panel discussions for him. I rarely feel like a "nobody" at professional / academic events, but I definitely felt out of place at this conference because everyone was so famous in the high level military, or was a well known professor.

I put in my 2 week notice to quit my Hilton job. It's very stressful and low pay. I will leave DC in 5 weeks anyways. I want to have time to visit Mary in Princeton before I go.

I'm so excited! I'm going back to San Diego soon! I get to be a student again and learn! UCSD is paying for my tuition! I can live at home with mom, hopefully for free. Adam is letting me borrow his handgun! Debbie is letting me borrow her surfboard! My car is in the garage there! I have a job in DC lined up for me after I finish UCSD no matter what! Wow, life is good!