Monday, January 25, 2010

PUBS issue, tomorrow is day 1

After over 6 months of waiting, my journey finally begins tomorrow morning!! I'm both excited and terrified at the same time! A friend of mine shared a verse with me on Sunday that serves as a good reminder for me and even all of us. Isaiah 41:10: "So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." This will be a tough year, maybe the toughest of my life. But I will hold to that promise that no matter what, God is with me and everything that happens to me will be according to his plan. I'm excited for UPT, because I know I will grow closer to Him. My biggest challenges in life have always proven to also be the most fruitful experiences and biggest learning opportunities too; I'm sure this will be no different.

During the last few days, we have been undergoing "Mental Performance Training." It is designed to help us better perform under pressure situations by allowing us to multi-task more efficiently. The theory is that if we can move some of our conscious efforts into our sub-conscious, we have a higher capacity to do more mentally. To make this happen, we have reverted back to a Kindergarden type of learning style by playing with bricks and arrows and learn about shape recognition, color recognition, classification, categorization, etc. They have a vast amount of different exercises for us to do on a daily basis, and for most of us including an instructor pilot who has sat in on it with us, the day usually ends with a massive headache. I don't have time to get into details on what the exercises themselves are, but it is a very unique method of training. We are the first class to go through this training, and depending on our performance in UPT, they may decide to include this training with other classes.

Today was publications issue (pubs for short). It was epic as expected...... We walked into a classroom with 29 chairs, in front of each was a 2.5 foot tall stack of paper which is to be our reading assignment for the next 6 months. Most of it will be read in the next 6 weeks during the Academic phase (phase I). This stack of pubs was about 20 or 30 pounds of pure paper, kind of like what you would expect from a 21 credit hour semester in college. It's definitely not anything we can't handle, but it will certainly keep us busy!! I have pictures I took of the pubs in my room...I'll do what I can to post those on my blog this weekend!

Tomorrow is day 1...my prayer is that whatever comes of this phase of my life, I would be content with its result and let God show me the path he wants me to walk. Even if it was not what I had anticipated, I pray that I will be able to align my will with His will and be joyful for the blessing of even being able to fly airplanes for a living. God's been very good to me to let me do this...it is certainly a dream come true; I couldn't be any more excited for it to start. Thanks again for all your support...let the journey begin!!

-Chris

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