UW Madison football lost their first home game last night. I know this because I live two blocks from the stadium and heard plenty of inappropriate statements being hurled at rival fans. Sore losers I guess. I can understand a little how they feel, as somebody who is fairly dedicated to a certain sports team (RIP Ozzie Sox), but I think there's a difference between college football fans and (real) baseball fans. All I know is that living near Camp Randall was definitely nice for a little while, its close proximity to campus makes things easy for me and I enjoy my walks around the neighborhood, but this will probably be my only (almost a full) year in this apartment. Shoneypants is coming into town next weekend and we're going to look at a couple of places less in the campus area. It's crazy, but a lot of the nicer buildings are already leasing for Fall 2012! I like the idea of this move for many reasons, but one of my favorite reasons is that I will ideally not be around for the actually moving of the stuff! I'll leave for my internship with cat and belongings in one place, and return to have it moved somewhere else. Yaaaaaaaay not doing things.(Less yay to my control-freak nature that will have me moving everything around the apartment the minute I move in.)
This week has been relatively slow, the week before I battled the massive plague given to me by my dear father. (Don't worry, it was actually a good week to have it..not a ton of work..sort of.) I have never seen so many tissues stacked up in one place before, and my apartment is still recovering from the mess of not cleaning for several days. (Also don't worry here, it's mostly clean now) I had some lovely help from my Madison Gang in getting me what I needed, and managed to only miss one class for the whole week, so that was good. Unfortunately, this week both my tutor and my grammar teacher needed to take a day off due to some horrible cold that they both denied having picked up from me. I'm really liking school. It's busy, but it's so much what I want to learn. I've also recently opened my world to the breadth of non-profit organizations based in Madison, and I'm not so scared about finding a job when I graduate anymore. I'm applying for a couple of local internships for next semester, just so I can really have more experience in the field, and then I hopefully will be working somewhere awesome this summer! I have an organization in mind, but I don't want to spill the beans just yet as it's relatively up in the air. I met with the program director on Friday and he really thinks it would be a great place for me to intern, and it's seems hopeful that they would take on an international intern, but in this process they keep reminding us to "be flexible" about things, because there are all sorts of little details that need to get worked out. I'm fine with that, I would really like this internship, but I know that I'll find something else and it least they FINALLY understand what I'm going for. I also picked my classes for next semester, and I'll register November 14th! (Which happens to be a very special day for a very special person)
That's all really..my paper topics are interesting to me, but they're also proving slightly difficult to research. I'm having trouble with something that I feel is sort of a "first year grad student problem", where I come up with original ideas, but then don't know how to prove them without looking at research that's already out there. Since we don't qualify for assistanships and such, there is research I would like to conduct in the field, but don't obviously have the means to do so. For instance, in my concentration area course I'm writing about how tourism and globalization promote language extinction, and my teacher thinks it would be a good idea for me to do a case study on a particular language, but I really have NO idea how I'm supposed to follow a single endangered language without trekking through a forest in South America to interview people in a language I don't even understand, and on the other hand I can't see myself just collecting my own case study by reading other studies conducted by other people. It's hard to explain, but I think I feel more pressure with this paper because we're submitting them to journals at the end of the semester, so I really would like for it to be published.
My other paper is on humanitarian aid to people who are handicapped in West Africa and in particular whether or not developed countries (specifically their former colonizers) are responsible for providing this aid. It's super interesting, but there isn't a ton of information out there either. These projects are definitely stretching my brain!
I guess that should be it, because this is getting long and people probably won't want to read much more. I was going to put up pictures, but my phone appears to have vanished somewhere under the five blankets I have on my bed, so those may not come until later today.
Stay warm everyone!
1 comment:
All sounds good Elena! Should be fun to try to find a grown up apartment for next year:) Have a fun weekend! Love Mom
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