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!
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