Last Day of Undergraduate Class??

So yesterday marked my very last of class as an undergrad. Whoa! Pretty trippy. I haven't had much to blog about, actually, because these last flew weeks have seemed to blow by at such a rate that I haven't really given myself ample time to reflect on them. Take my last Coe College Choir Concert on Sunday: This would be my very last choir concert as a student, and my last time every performing a concert with these people again. There's no reason why I shouldn't have been anticipating this somber moment, but a combination of refusal to get emotional and busyness put the emotionality of singing in my last concert aside until the second half of the actual concert. Then it hit me like a tidal wave! It was so unexpected. All of a sudden in the middle of a silly song where the smaller group Crimson and Gold had everything from pans to construction cones on their heads, tears jumps right up to the brims of my eyes and couldn't be stopped! It was really out of the blue. I mean it's strange, because all my life I have been someone who emotionally prepared for big moments such as this so much it was almost to a fault. But some combination of studying abroad, graduating, and looking to the future, has evolved me into someone who focuses more on the happy things, the good-feeling things, the positive things. And it's great, but it obviously is a mindset that exists at the expense of moments for introspection. Don't get me wrong I still feel that I reflect on life quite frequently, but a person only has so much cognitive energy and so focusing on the here and the now and the positives takes up a little of that energy I would have typically spent on reflection. So needless to say, being suddenly overcome with repressed emotion was a new experience for me and one that came as a shock right in the middle of my last choir concert. My last choir concert! So strange. 

I really hope that I continue to sing outside of college. It's always an option to join a church choir, but the monotony of week after week, Sunday after Sunday singing church music may start to wear on me. Maybe I could find a secular choir? Or try out for a musical? Agh it's so weird! I keep having flashes of myself outside of college, sitting in my new apartment, looking up clubs or groups in the area where I can interact socially with new people! I mean what? No campus-sponsored clubs and organizations to choose from? No choir scholarships? No caf where everyone eats?? Weird!! How do you make friends outside of this structured place!? Weird, but exciting. :) 

Well today is Reading Day, which is dedicated to studying for finals week, which starts tomorrow. As I have two finals tomorrow, I think I'll start using this day for what it's intended for :) Stay tuned for graduation reflection!

Katie

Research symposium, and nearing the end?

Well hello all!

It has been an insane last few weeks. All of a sudden the excitement, the anxiety, the promise of finishing up college here in LESS THAN A MONTH???!!! has really been setting in and accumulating. With the tasks of finding a place to live this summer, securing a summer job, and all the while continuing with my efforts to look to the future with potential full-time positions, I haven't even had the chance to take time and really truly reflect on everything I've experienced in the last four years here in this wonderful place. (That was a preface of what's to come. :)) What I've mainly been focusing on have been the present and the important tasks that are at hand. For starters, Wednesday of this last week was the Research Symposium. Every year we look forward to symposium day because it's a day off of classes and a chance to support our fellow classmates by checking out the research they've spent months, sometimes years investigating. But this year I got to see symposium day from a different perspective. This year I was the presenter and my peers came out to see what I had to talk about. My research consisted of analyzing the effects of the Poverty Simulation we put on and Coe on participants' attitudes toward poverty and its causes in America. It was such a wonderful experience! I took part in the poster session, so I was surrounded by dozens of other students who had put their research into posters as well. I learned a lot, both from the other students' research projects and from the people who approached my poster with their questions and insights. It gave me a new perspective on our findings, and prepared me for the Psychology Symposium that we'll be putting on next week. That symposium calls for an actual presentation of our research in front of all the psych professors and others who are interested in the research; so in other words it's a slightly more nerve-racking experience than just standing by my poster. I feel very much prepared for it now!

Another big part of last week was interviewing for positions at two of the local programs for troubled youth in Cedar Rapids. It's my hope that I can eventually secure a full-time position at one of the two places to gain a sense of what it may be to eventually become a social worker. You see my ultimate goal for the next year or two is to narrow down what I would like to eventually go to graduate school for, and social work is one of my potential paths. So a job at either one of the locations I interviewed at (Four Oaks and Tanager Place) would definitely be a helpful starts. 

My most stress-relieving step I took this week was...(drumroll please!)...putting a deposit on my first real-live apartment!!!! Agh I'm so excited. This place is huge, and is one of four units in a big old house right across the street from campus. I'll be living with my same roommate from freshman year, and we're really excited to just finally have a plan!! Such a relief! 

Well as the end of the year approaches, you can be expecting increasingly more sentimental posts. Take care!