So this is my last blog.  I will be graduating in just over 24 hours and I will be leaving UMBC to adventure out into the real world.  As of this moment, I’m not 100% where I will end up, but I was actually contacted by NIH again and told that they are pretty sure they can get around the hiring freeze, which is exciting.  I took my last final this morning and am now busy checking out residents for the summer.  It is really starting to sink in that I am really leaving behind my undergraduate institution and going into the real world, with real bills and a real job.  It’s a little scary, but I think UMBC has prepared me well.

My only hope is that I can keep all of the close connections that I have made over these four years.  There are really some wonderful people at UMBC, both students and employees (faculty and staff) who have touched my life and changed it for the better.  I don’t know what I would do without them, and I want to take this oppurtunity to thank all of them for everything they have done for me.  The list is too long to put on here, but you all know who you are.

It is really bitter sleep to leave a place you have so many happy memories with.  I will never forget them, but at the same time I think it is time to move on so they can all stay happy and end my career at UMBC on a good note.  Who knows, I might be back here in 2 years as a graduate student!  Only time will tell.

Thank you all for reading my blog, and I hope you found it informative and enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

No, I’m not talking about the pill.  Luckily that isn’t my dilemma.  I am talking about plan B for what I am going to do after I graduate.  As I said in previous blogs, I was interviewing at NIH, at a subbranch called NIA (National Institute of Aging) for a research assistant position to give me some experience before I went off to get my Ph.D.  Well this Tuesday I went for an interview, which was interesting.  It was less like an interview and more like an information session, just giving me the details of the job.  We discussed details and it really seemed like the job was all mine and good to go.  They were suppose to email me about contact someone to work out more details, and they even mentioned I could wait and start the first of June to give me some time off…

Well then I got an email saying NIH has a hiring freeze which they don’t plan to unfreeze any time soon, so they can’t hire me or anyone else…I was really upset.  I had a lot of my chips on this one and it ended up flopping on me.  Luckily though my research professor, Dr. Waldstein, has MANY connections and so she had me set up for a position at Johns Hopkins University doing research.  I go for an interview this Tuesday and I’m really excited about this position too.  I’m trying not to get too excited though so that I don’t have a repeat of last time, but I’m really hoping this one pans out so I can have my life set in stone a little more…we shall see!

So it has come to my attention that most of my time nowadays has been about planning for the real world.  I remember just last month I was freaking out about what I was going to do post-graduation, and now it seems like everything is in place and now all I have to do is make the exciting decisions!

My friend and I have decided to get an apartment together and so we are going to begin apartment hunting soon, which is really cool.  For the first time I’ll really be living on my own-cooking my own food, paying my own bills, furnishing my own rooms.  I’m really, really excited to get that underway and find a place.  I was telling someone how excited I am to start looking at thrift stores for old furniture that I can reupholster and turn into something for the apartment.

The other part of the real world is of course getting a job.  I was afraid that I wasn’t going to have any options, well now it seems I have 3 very viable options.  I already mentioned that I interviewed at the Naval Medical Research Center, and have since found out that they are contacting my references, which I take as a good sign.  I also have an interview set up at the National Institute of Aging for next Tuesday, which was a job I didn’t apply for but instead was recommended to me by my research professor, who put a good word in for me.  Then my research professor also found me a job opening at Johns Hopkins University as a research assistant in neuropsychology, which I haven’t applied to yet.  She was specifically asked if there was an undergraduate she had that would be good for the job so that they didn’t have to advertise to the general public a lot.  So basically, if all goes well, I’ll have the pick of the three and get to choose whichever one I wish.

I can’t wait though until I start bringing in a paycheck and having my own place and really taking control over my life.  I know I say that now as the ignorant student I am that has no idea what it is really like on my own, but I think I have a level head on my shoulders and that I’ll be able to pull it off, right?

I guess only time will tell, but in the meantime, I’m still really pumped!!

This this week has been so EXTREMELY busy and filled with chaos.  You can normally figure out when I get swamped because the posts stop coming.  But this past week had a lot of ups and downs.  To end on a good note, let’s start with the downs:

So this weekend was Quadmania, which is an annual event put on by the Student Events Board with carnival rides and live bands lasting for three days.  It sounds like a good time, right?  Well the downfall comes in that I am a resident assistant, and Quadmania weekend means extra duty.  We had to be on duty for multiple, multiple hours and do many many rounds of the building making sure everything is okay and that there wasn’t any illegal activities.  We literally had to go every hour and do rounds, plus there were curfews for RAs so we had to be inside the building by a certain time and had to remain on campus all weekend.  We couldn’t even run down the street to Giant to pick up food…

Anyway, on a more positive note, my interview at the Naval Medical Research Center went well and they contacted me asking for references, so fingers crossed this works out.  I also have an interview set up at the National Institute of Health for a research position over there next week.  Hopefully that works out too so then I get to take my pick between the two of them.

Really, a lot more happened, but I’ll just leave you with those two, which were two of the more interesting events.  Now I just get to come back to the reality of school and focus back on work, which I’ve been distracted by with other responsibilities and dreams of the future…

So I can’t remember if I have been updating you guys on my job searches, so I decided to do that now!

First off, so I was planning to go get my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology.  Unfortunately Grad Schools are looking for someone with more experience under their belt, so I didn’t get in anywhere

But that is okay, because I think I am a bit unfocused when it comes to the field, which I quickly found out.  I know I want to go into Neuropsychology, but apparently that isn’t enough, so I need some years of experience under my belt to decide.  This is when the job market comes in.

My research professor (bless her heart) has been doing an awesome job trying to scope out some jobs for me, and she potentially has one or two for me.  They both are at NIH.  That’s right, the National Institute of Health!  When she told me I was so excited.  They are at NIA, the National Institute of Aging, and the only concrete one that she has told me about was in a Psychophysiology lab dealing with the relationship between the heart and the mind.  It isn’t exactly neuropsyc, but it is a related field and close to what I am looking for.  That, and it’s at NIH and its designed to beef up resumes and get you into Grad School.  Score!  She is also looking into if there is a neuropsyc lab that with an opening, with the same premise that it would be preparing me for Grad School.  Even more of a score!

These details are still in the works, and so before I had heard of these, I had applied to a bunch of jobs.  Well one of them got back to me this week and I have an interview next week as a research assistant doing research for vaccines for the U.S. Navy…I’m like, wow!  The Navy…I’m really excited about it, but unfortunately it is in my second choice of careers.  My primary is neuropsychology, and I feel like if for some reason this didn’t work out that I would want to go into some type of pathology/vaccination research, using my biochemistry degree.  So really this job is my safety net in case everything else falls through.

I’m so excited though because if all goes well, I’ll be deciding whether to work for the Navy or for NIH, two huge names that will make my resume look FANTASTIC!  SOOOO Excited!

So I’m sure you have all heard of the dreaded term “Senioritis.”  Basically, this is a condition that befalls most seniors when they enter their last year of school, either in high school, college, or even graduate school.  Apathy takes over as you realize that you are in the final stretches of your career at this school at this level, and you feel as though each piece of work is insignificant, either because you have a job lines up or because you are just ready to move on.

Well, I most certainly have come down with senioritis…and a bad case of it.  I am truly done with college and ready to move on, but I still have a month and a half.  I also feel like certain circumstances have come about that make me “done” even more with the college environment and these ideals that individuals have.  I remember coming into college thinking it was so different from high school and how perfect it was.  Well, it certainly is different than high school in a good way, but it certainly is not perfect.  And I feel like the longer I stay here, the longer my ideal vision is ripped to shreds about individuals.

So in short, senior=bad.  I’m undoing all these great thoughts I have.  And i think that’s why I am in such a rush to get out of here.  I feel like the rest of this year has been poisoned or tanted in some way so that I need to just get rid of it so I keep all the fond memories I had of this place.  And my goal is not to soundlike a cynic about UMBC or college, because there are MANY fond memories I have.  I think it is just about that time to hit the old dusty trail…

So again this week has been crazy with its ups and downs, and once again this weekend, I went to an event sponsored by Parks and People.  Strange, huh?  So as a Resident Assistant, in the middle of the semester, we always do something called Development Day, where for a couple of hours we do something that professionally develops us as a staff.  In this past, these have been sessions/workshops where we talk about things like getting into grad school and time management.  This time around though, they decided to have us do a day of service.  Now I am all about doing service, but this used to be something we did during our Winter training.  I really enjoyed this because it helped break up the couple of days of training and it helped bring the staff back together again.  This time though they moved it to mid-semester, which is okay.  The downfall though is that everyone is anxious to leave because they have other things to do, and for our staff, half of them couldn’t even go because of prior commitments and because of duty.

But anyway, so we all went to a park in the city and we cleaned up the wooded area by a stream.  It was really cool to see how much a little work could do to transform the stream, and all in all we picked up A LOT of trash.  I know another RA and I cleaned up a ton of bottles and some tires, and we were told in total we cleaned up 97 tires, 60 something bags of trash, almost an entire car, and a lot more.  So again, very impactful and productive, but I just wish we had done it at a better time.  Oh well, back to the text books…

So this weekend I have been on duty as a Resident Assistant, which hasn’t been too bad.  I originally wasn’t suppose to be working this weekend but I switched with one of my staff members to help them out.   Weekend duty is normally the worst because you go stir-crazy because you can’t leave the building.  Luckily though there was a service event planned through the National Residence Hall Honorary, an organization on campus that I’m the president for, so I got coverage for a couple hours and was able to go.

The service event was in the inner city and all we were told was that we were cleaning up some parks.  There were only about 6 of us that went, but there were a lot of other volunteers there as well, which was awesome.  We actually went to two community gardens, not parks, and we cleaning them up so that people in the neighborhood could plant flowers or gardens in these plots.  They seemed to be dumping grounds currently for a lot of trash and debris, and the garden was overrun with weeds, so our job was to clean it all out and get it ready for the neighborhood.

We unfortunately were only there for a couple of hours, but we really made  an impact on the appearance of the gardens.  The work was backbreaking (being 6 foot and pulling out weeds on the ground for a couple hours do not go hand in hand) but in the end the people seemed extremely happy that we had showed up and helped.  Our Vice President of Service who organized the event is hopefully going to have us go back there next month, which I think would be a great idea.  It was a really good feeling to be working on something that might seem small to many people, but that could have a significant outcome on the attitude and feeling of the community.

Luckily I have today though to recover from the work, stretch my back, and get ready to go back to the grind of school.  Woohoo!

That is the only way I can describe yesterday.  It was positively aweful.  Wednesdays are always my busy days, but to have a Wednesday after Spring Break is just too much.  I had a Physical Chemistry exam that morning, so I had to study and stress about that, then I had another class, I had to work in my lab and test two participants, then I went to another class (late because my participants ran over), then I had an hour or two to take a brief nap.  Then I had an executive board meeting for NRHH, then a presentation for another class (the alien one) then a staff meeting, then a post-staff meeting, then a post-post-staff meeting.  Needless to say, it was a crazy day.  I was so stressed about everything that I was physical ill.  I had a feeling in my chest that lasted almost the whole day.  I hate it, but there was nothing I could do but go through the day.

In the end, I got a C on my Chem test (which isn’t too bad considering) and my presentation went really well.  After that, my chest at least went back to normal.  Then I had to deal with the stress of my RA job from my staff.  To put things as simple as possible, I have been having some issues with some members of my staff and they have reached an apex.  It reached that point and I had to talk to people until 5am in the morning…I was so dehydrated from talking so much, and I didnt have anything to eat because I felt ill so I know i was in a bad place.  Let’s just hope things get better soon.

Spring break is SOOOO close I can taste it.  Today is the last day of classes, and I’m already done (luckily no tests this week).  All I have left is to finish running some participants in my research lab, have a lab meeting, and then rest for a couple hours before closing my building as a Resident Assistant (RA).  Luckily too though one of the former RAs is coming up to pay me a visit so I will get to see her and catch up and such before I have to go back to doing work.

I can’t wait until tomorrow though because I am going to Binghampton to watch the UMBC Retrievers on the rise!  That’s right, UMBC is in the American East Championship game again and I have a ticket!  SGA (Student Government Association) has sponsored a bus to go up to New York  so we can cheer on our retrievers!  The only issue I have with that is that we leave at 5am to make it to the game on time…Uh!  The first day of spring break and I’ll be awake before the sun…oh well.  It’ll be worth it to see the Retrievers yet again take home the American East Championship and go on to the NCAA!

Now all I need to do is finish up all this work before I can wake up way too early to sit on a bus!  Woohoo!  I’m really looking forward to the game and the time away.  I love UMBC and all, but sometimes you just need to get away from it all, and be a little less productive.  So until I get back from spring break, just think about me sleeping…because that’s what I’ll be spending the majority of my time doing!