I quit grad school. I even felt bad about it for a few days. But then I committed to build an airplane, and now I feel much better.

I knew grad school was going to be a substantial amount of work, but after several weeks of essentially doing nothing but working for 4 hours after work and all the weekends, I was starting to fall behind. Someone else at Georgia Tech mentioned that they’d already taken 3 days off of work in order to try to get caught up with school work. You know what? Screw that. I don’t need the degree; I thought it would be fun. This much stress just isn’t fun, and Joanna pleaded with me to quit on multiple occasions. The idea of quitting probably wouldn’t have occurred to me if she hadn’t been so persistent about it (I actually thought she was being dramatic at first, but it became clear that she was not.) Once I started thinking about quitting, I did it as quickly as possible because the refund was based on the day I decided to withdraw.

But I’m really doing this. Building an airplane. This is probably the most excited I’ve been about something since I started flight school. I never thought I’d have an airplane of my own, and I still won’t. My coworker, Randy, and I are doing this together, and we’ll share ownership when we’re done. We have no idea what we’re doing, but we have books, the internets, no grad school, and gumption.

I need to start a builder’s log. I initially decided I wasn’t going to do the blog-as-builder’s-log thing, but it’s probably a good idea. The builder’s log is required to prove to the FAA that we built 51% of the aircraft, and they like pictures. So I’ll probably set up a separate WordPress site for that…

Most of our tools and the kit for the aircraft tail arrived today. I’m planning on taking it home Thursday and using the long weekend to get started!