Photo by Jed Owen on Unsplash
Welcome back Graduate Students! It’s the start of a new semester. Maybe it’s just your second semester – maybe it’s your twelfth. Maybe you live here in town – maybe you commute. No matter who you are or where you are in your graduate school journey, navigating life in a new(ish) town can feel overwhelming. If you’re new, you probably just spent all of the Fall semester just surviving. You had HEB Curbside Delivery and wrote your seminar papers to the tune of some sad PB&J sandwiches and late-night Ted Lasso therapy sessions on your laptop. Exploring your new town wasn’t really a priority. We get it, we completely get it. We’ve all been there.
The trouble is, those cloistered, over-caffeinated choices turn into habits, into ways of life. Just ask the GSA reps who sit at the GSA Farmer’s Market booth on Student Weekend at the Waco Downtown Farmer’s Market – despite giving away free money to spend at the stalls, they still return to campus at the end of the day with a huge stack of unspent vouchers. Too many graduate students don’t explore the wacky Waco world beyond the boundaries of campus, and we want to change that!
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be running a series of blog posts designed to help you get to know Waco. It will be our own version of the “Best of Waco,” but from the mouths of graduate students. These suggestions for where to eat, where to get a hair cut, where to get an oil change, they will all come from graduate students. They understand your budget and time limitations. And they still think there’s a way to lead a vibrant, engaged life in this wonderful, weird little city.
Do you have suggestions you think we should include in future posts? Drop them in the comments below – we’d love to hear about your favorite haunts in old Waco town.
Anna E. Beaudry is a second-year English PhD student studying 19th-century American literature. Her primary area of research focuses on female writers in the New England regionalist movement and material feminisms. She earned her Master’s at Baylor University in May 2020. Anna is Baylor’s Graduate Writing Center coordinator and president of the English Graduate Student Association. She is also BearTracks blog editor for the Graduate School.