I am really terrible at taking photos.

With everything I have going on in my life, I have realized my memory is not what it used to be. I used to be able to remember a lot more, especially fun memories. Now, it’s hard for me to think of how I would be able to accomplish everything without my calendar. It’s my lifeline. It tells me what I am doing and what needs to be done for every hour in my day. I have a lot of responsibilities, and it’s important to me that I keep up with those responsibilities and do the best I can. My calendar has saved me the energy of remembering, so I can give more energy to everything I do. Consequentially, I have a terrible memory now. I am so out of practice.

Which is why I am trying so hard to remember to take pictures at everything I go to and of times I know I will want to remember. Time really goes by so fast in college. I can’t believe I am halfway done! So many amazing memories have been made in my two years here, and I know it will be hard for me to remember them. So. I must take pictures. I thought of this about a month ago, and have been trying to remember to take pictures often. But, I have found that it is even difficult for me to remember that! So as this semester ends and I head off into Summer break, my resolution is to take A LOT more pictures next semester. Hopefully you will get to SEE more of my life next school year.

Until then, I will be working here at UMBC for a little bit  and working for a new virtual network company! I will be taking a Summer class during the second session to lighten my course load in the fall and trying to relax at some point too! I hope you enjoy your Summer thoroughly and I promise pictures when I start blogging again in the Fall:)

May 8th 2013

I can write a 25 page paper. I can argue and discuss about the New Deal and the Cold War. I can help you with your tax forms. I can dance bachata and merengue. I can program a fun game to play. I can tell you all about UMBC and how great it is, and even when it isn’t. I can be offered 5 jobs in one day. I can write an A+ paper on African American Women in history in an hour. I can make new friends. I can be Vice President of the Hispanic Latino Student Union. I can research all day.

But. I cannot. Create a 5-minute film clip for an imaginary television show I am creating for my American Studies 100 class. I have been working on trying to edit this one clip I recorded for the past 3 hours.

I am taking a break, obviously. I think I have had about enough of that for today. This is real life. This is college. A part of the requirements to graduate at UMBC are to take general education classes. This includes a Humanities credit. I am taking this American Studies class to fulfill my requirement. I am not an American Studies Major or Minor, but I did think it would be interesting to learn about ‘Murica! And it has been. Class has been pretty interesting and feasible up until this movie project. It’s included discussions on what it means to be an American, what Americans wear, and what kind of Americans there are. It has been incredibly insightful and I have enjoyed it.

A lot of people complain that they are required to take a class that they will never use, or don’t necessarily need. I think it’s good though. For example. As of right now, I CANNOT make a 5-minute movie clip. BUT, I will learn. I am going to ask my friend, who is a film major to teach me the basics on how to edit and how to make 5 minutes worth of a video. Right now, I cannot think of a time where this knowledge will be applicable to my life, except for this class, but I am sure I will need this one day. These are tools that I don’t need to be exceptional in, but are good to know. In all the interviews I have been doing, I have found that any skills are always helpful in securing a job. Now, if an employer asks if I have the capabilities to create a short video-I will get to say yes!

College is about learning, being open to new things and trying to get a job. While it may seem pointless to some, a general education requirement can help a student to achieve all those goals. I know it’s helped me in reflecting on who I am, learning a new skill, and maybe it will be useful one day when I need a job!

 

College = Opportunities

College is A LOT of responsibility. But sometimes, that’s a really awesome thing. I feel so blessed to have the opportunities I do have here at UMBC. This week has been especially rewarding because I have been given such awesome opportunities. Three exciting things for my future happened this week.

1.) We had HLSU elections and I won Vice-President. The new President and I have already been working together and are super excited to take HLSU to the next level next academic year!

2.) I was offered an internship I really wanted on campus! It is with the UMBC Mosaic Center, which focuses on diversity on campus. I have a passion for cultures and definitely believe in diversity, so wanted to work with something I would love, and I got it! Next year, I will have that job, so maybe you’ll see me around!

3.) This Summer I will probably have a job close to home, which is exactly what I wanted. I miss my family and haven’t been able to spend as much time as I would like to this past year, so for the Summer I wanted a job that would let me stay close to them.

Sometimes, you have to be denied, and denied, and denied, and denied, and denied again to get the opportunities you really need in your life. The important thing is to never give up. I didn’t. I applied to A LOT of places,

What a cultured weekend!

Tonight I went “on a trip around Asia”. All the Asian groups on campus joined their efforts together and presented an Asian cultural night. There was performances, food, and a fashion show. I went to see my old roommate perform a Nepalese dance with her friends. But there were performances and representation from all different kinds of places like, Burma, the Philippines, India, China and Japan. It was fun to see how the dancing and music was different from each other, as well as the dancing done by my Latino heritage.

On Saturday, I went to the Caribbean Student Council’s cultural event, Carnival. It was a lot of fun! The weather was nice, which made the water slide and water balloons feel refreshing. There was also a paint fight. So if you know how Holi or the Color Run uses paint for fun, it was done here the same way. It was fun to get my friends all painted and try running away from them. I felt like a kid again! At the end of it, I had one pink ear, one blue ear and green hair. I got really painted.

It was really fun being able to share the culture of others and celebrate heritage. I hope we get a lot of people at our Hispanic Latino Student Union event next weekend! Here is the Facebook event! You are welcome to come! It’s free for everyone and I’d love to share my culture with you. https://www.facebook.com/events/138249029691536/

My favorite part of the day.

It is difficult for me to have a routine here at school. There’s always a meeting I need to go to or an event in addition to classes that pops up. There is only one thing that I do at the same time every day. Every morning, I go to the cafe in the library, Pura Vida, where the same lady works every morning. She has a parfait and banana ready for me to buy and eat for breakfast. I take my breakfast and enjoy it  in the atrium of the library. There are some regulars – the same people who come to the library every morning- but it’s usually different people every day. It’s not a quiet part of the library, but I enjoy the chit chatter and the noise of people getting their morning coffee. I eat while I read the Washington Post app I have and learn about what is going on in the world today. Today, for example, The Bush’s are having a library dedicated to them in Dallas. All living presidents will be there, including President Obama. This is a spectacular way for me to start my day, because it is so humbling. I eat a simple breakfast and read about all the horrible, exciting, important things that are going on outside of my world. It’s a great reminder of how big the world is and how minor my troubles are.

QUADMANIA!!

Quadmania is the Spring time festival here at UMBC. It’s a weekend event that includes a carnival and concert. On Saturday, HLSU set a table at the carnival. Our activity was a pinata. So we had people participate in hitting a pinata to get some candy. The carnival had all kinds of things to do though. There was a Wipe-Out (like the tv show) obstacle course, pony rides, food trucks, pin the arm-on-the-student, and much more! It was all a lot of fun and I only managed to turn pink instead of red this time around. The concert, which was last night, was extremely fun! I had the awesome opportunity to see Macklemore! He sings thrift shop, and his most recent hit can be found here.

The show was INSANE. He was a great performer and managed to get everyone on their feet jumping with their hands in the air. The atmosphere was just amazing. The show sold out the first week tickets were on sale about a month ago, so I knew the RAC would be packed! There were probably about 2,000 people there.It was awesome to hear him say ” “UMBC”. It was even more awesome to hear him say how awesome we were. It was a great night of fun before the craziness of the end of the semester begins. It makes me really excited for next year-I hope someone just as great comes!

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis

My sister took all these photos, photo credit to her!

The trumpet player was a lot of fun on top of the speakers!

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Shakespeare play, Two Gentlemen of Verona, was performed this past week here at UMBC. It was an adaptation done by the UMBC Theatre students and it was amazing! The night I went was free for UMBC students, and even the president of our university was there. I was a bit nervous going to see the show, because I don’t understand the Shakespearean language very well. However, the show was extremely easy to follow and understand. It was a Shakespeare production so there was comedy, sex references and a puppy! I thoroughly enjoyed the show, as it was extremely entertaining. The night we went to go see the show, there was a terrible thunderstorm. There was slight flooding and my shoes and pants up to my knees were completely soaked. The whole time we were walking to the show, we kept saying that hoped our trek through the rain was worth it. This is another time I am thankful for a smaller campus, because even though we had to walk all the way across campus, we were only in the storm for about fifteen minutes. I am also thankful the show was really good, so it was worth walking that fifteen minutes in the pouring rain.

B’more close to great opportunities!

I have a wide variety of interests, but it includes musicals. I have always enjoyed the theatre, dramatics and music. It’s another way to get lost in another world, and I love it. My favorite musical is Les Miserables. It’s a serious, thought-provoking musical based off the book by Victor Hugo. It’s about a man who has a secret identity during the French Revolution and has to continuously hide from his past. I had the great opportunity to see it today at the Hippodrome, a theatre in Baltimore City. It’s so nice to be so close to the city, to have opportunities like this. It took fifteen minutes from my dorm room to be at the theatre and be lost in my favorite musical. At home, in my rural county, the only thing 15 minutes away is a Walmart, and then there’s nothing in between there. Being near the city, I can go see a musical, a baseball game, a concert all within 15 minutes!

Be Brave.

The white skin is my unburnt skin. The red part is sunburn. It hurts so bad. At least this means Summer is coming!

Last night I went to UMBC’s annual Drag Show. It was a competition for UMBC students to win the title of Drag Queen or King. There were so many people there, about 300. It was a very entertaining show, with lots of comedy! Not only were the performers, well, entertaining, but the audience was a lot of fun to be a part of. Everyone was energetic and supportive. The audience was very diverse too, almost in an unexpected way. Judges for the competition included President of the Freedom Alliance (the organization hosting the event) and the director for the Office of Student Life at UMBC. There was even someone I had interviewed for a job with there. There were people who had high positions in the UMBC community at a drag show, it all seemed a little out of place-but don’t get me wrong, it was great! It was great to have so many people who were supportive of the show and just wanted to have a good time.

I was glad to have been a part of that audience. Something they did for the audience during the show was allow people to come up and walk like a model on stage. It was voluntary, and well my good friend and I just happened to volunteer. There are some things in life you just gotta do for yourself, and this was one of them. I am a proud woman, and it felt great to walk out on that stage and strut my stuff. I definitely let my inner Beyonce out, and for a few seconds I was a pop star.

Now, had I been thinking more about what I was doing, I probably wouldn’t have volunteered. I wouldn’t have gotten on a stage in front of 300 people and walk around like I was hot stuff. But, I did. I must have a lot of confidence and really love myself, because I didn’t even think about my terrible sunburn! It’s so painful and bright. I walked in front of hundreds of people, revealing my horrible sunburn. Oh well! It’s just one of those experiences I don’t know if I will ever have again, and it’s one I think everyone deserves. It’s an undescribable feeling when you walk out on a stage with everyone cheering for you. You feel kinda like you’re on top of the world. You feel like you’re really great. Everyone deserves to feel that way. If you ever get an opportunity to release your inner Beyonce, I say take that chance. I’m sure you’ll look much better than I did anyway;)

Interviews and Applications…Oh My!

Tis the season to sit and wait. In March and the beginning of April, many applications were due for internships, Summer jobs, jobs on campus next year, and now they’re all done. Now comes the most difficult part of the application process for me. Waiting. I had for interviews this past week and two this coming week. I won’t hear from those people or the other applications I submitted until the middle and end of April, possibly the beginning of May. It’s really hard not knowing what I will be doing over the Summer right now. I applied to so many places and I really hope I get an internship. I will accept whatever happens, the hardest part is just not knowing any decisions right now. I know I will find out soon enough, but I can’t help noticing May, and the end of the semester is right around the corner.

Because I want to get a job as soon as I graduate from the University, it is really important that I spend my breaks gaining experience and internships. I want to build a good skill set that will be valuable to employers when I graduate. I graduate in two years (hopefully), which means I only have two Summers left. I am really working hard to get a good internship and be successful. I’m not in a sorority, so I don’t have any connections that way. My networking is limited to where I’m from, which is not Baltimore or Washington, D.C. so that is a loose connection. I am on my own trying to obtain an internship on my good merit and character. I just hope all my hard work pays off.