On Researching

I'm enjoying my new career as a graduate student. It's to be expected, of course, that when you're paying that much for schooling (a figure I won't disclose but is readily available on the Wayne State University website if you poke around enough) you should try and get some enjoyment out of it. I think the thing that strikes me as the most different from my undergrad work is something they like to tout when you're entering the graduate program: This is time for you to do work that you find interesting.
In my undergrad, majoring in Speech Communication with a focus on rhetoric, I had to wade through a lot of stuff I did not care for. The first thing that springs to mind is my Argument & Debate class, where we picked one topic for the semester and used that for all debates in the class. Our topic was global warming, and I'm just so numb to the whole entirety of the concept, it could not have been any less interesting to me. Each piece of research was like Mt. Everest, and I had to summon all of my strength just to find the information I wanted in each article.
In the graduate program, however, it is different. Introduction to MA Comm Studies, COM 7000, is our entry-level class, which we must pass in order to proceed with the program, and in this class, our entire purpose is to write one good research paper. Do that, and congrats. Fail, and welcome back next semester. The topic is open, providing you can find relevant scholarly research on the subject. So here I sit, with a pile of articles on my topic, which is a brief look at narratives in videogames, and I cannot wait to read them. To be researching something that you're interested makes the whole process a lot less like work, and a lot more involving.
However, in writing this, I have diverged from my research (albeit for a much-needed break and glass of apple cider), and I must get back to work.