I stumbled upon a totally different angle for a paper I'm writing and it's definitely a risk BUT if it pays off it could be pretty huge!!!! Feels so, so good to have dedicated time to actually dig into a project again.
Also, I'm almost done with the last of my finals grading. After that, I'll have to write 7 letters of rec for various forms of med schools/DO/PA programs BUT then I'm DONE with this fucking job!!
After that, I'll have the summer to work on my own research and to prep my new courses for my objectively smarter (on average) students. Sooo freaking excited to have students who are both more intellectually capable and more willing to speak up in class. The students here *can* be quite good, but both the average and the lower threshold are a lot lower than I'm used to. I know capabilities among college-age students are actively deteriorating across the board thanks to AI usage (among other things), but it'll definitely help a lot to be at a highly selective place where students are more likely to intrinsically value the humanities.