I've had another lovely day! Of course, every single day thus far has been lovely!
Before I go on with today's happenings I'm going to back up just a bit...

Since my last entry I have had my first supervisory session with Fran (who is my research advisor and head of the social policy program). I'm really looking forward to the research, and I'm so glad she's my supervisor! She is extremely nice and I think she's going to be an absolutely brilliant supervisor.
We laid out my timeframe for my thesis during the first meeting. The thesis is 30,000 to 35,000 words (or about 50 t0 60+ pages in length). My thesis is tentatively on university-level educational attainment of first-generation Australian students (in Sydney University). I'll be using a largely qualitative methodology insofar as I'll be interviewing the students (which means I have to provide my proposal to the Human Ethics Research Committee in order to have clearance to interview the students), but I'll also be using Australian Bureau of Statistics data to determine if the stats actually are indicative of real-world experience. That is, I'll be inquiring of the students what boundaries and/or incentives they found when coming to university. For instance, did they find that there were more barriers than incentives? If so, why did they proceed? Was class an issue? etc...
My supervisor gave me a list of goals tailored specifically to my research and objectives which I found to be SO helpful! She also engaged me in discussion of my theoretical interests so she could gauge my theoretical strenghts/weaknesses and assess the direction in which my research may be going. I haven't had a supervisor do that before---it's such a great practice! Of course, I had a field day going on about how much I love these different theorists and who I feel would be most applicable to the research given their particular bent. I do love me some theory!
Oh! And she also encouraged me to prepare a paper for The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) conference, which will be held in New Zealand this year. By the way...I'm a member of TASA now! This is my first professional affiliation! Woo-hoo!!
Anyhow...I doubt I'll present anything at the New Zealand conference, but it's nice to receive the encouragement to do so and to be made to feel I could do so! :)

Yesterday was a pretty busy day...aside from the supervisory meeting. Toby (an Ambassadorial Scholar from Germany) and I got together for lunch at the Broadway Shopping Centre. We ended up eating at Tomodachi---one of those sushi train restaurants. It was such fun! We each took turns picking plates off the conveyor belt of sushi that was circulating around the bar. I kept getting the weird ones which wasn't too comfortint to Toby, but it made for an interesting experience! ha ha ha!

I went to the Just Enough Faith charity headquarters today. It was a bit of a trek from Earlwood, but definitely worth it. The folks were very nice. I look foward to getting to know them a bit better. I formally begin volunteering there next Friday---so more on that later!