It is the eve of my final quarter at OSU and I’m feeling surprisingly tranquil about it. I look back over the last two years and it’s amazing how much my life has changed, for better or worse, in that time. My health has pretty well gone to shit, but that’s on me. Stress and a tendency to overextend myself is not great for trying to keep up some sort of diet and exercise routine. In any other way I can think of though things are so much better. Some I can’t talk about here but it’s incredible what opportunities have been opened up for me. Had someone told me I would be any of these things would happen in two years of school, I’d have told them they were nuts:
I changed jobs, locally, and have worked up to a pretty significant bump over what I started the program at. I love the team of people I work with, which is not necessarily something I’d have said before either.
I was a TA for the intro course and now operating systems, one of the hardest courses in the program. A couple of my friends were recruited to TA and in a minor fit of jealousy and actual interest I inquired about the intro course and ended up doing that for 3 quarters. I was asked about OS before even taking it and I laughed, but I am unconvinced it wasn’t a trap to get me to really dig into the material while I was taking it!
I joined and later became active on a social platform for the program and became one of its most well known members. This then led to me becoming a peer tutor and getting paid for some of the time I was already spending helping other students make their way through the challenges I once faced. 🙂
I made real lasting friendships. I have never had trouble making friends, but it’s rare that I find ones that truly get me as a whole. It’s been refreshing to meet so many people that are like me but yet all very different in their own ways. I certainly did not expect to have a group of 3 other women that I would talk to about pretty much everything every day. Or a pretty close-knit Slack channel full of my kind of people – I’m not telling you which one this is if you don’t already know. 😛
It’s been a pretty crazy ride and I’ve been extremely burned out lately despite having taken the summer off to combat burnout. I took vacation last week so I could have the week off from both work and school. While the week did not quite go according to plan, it definitely helped! This weekend I started getting into tutorials for capstone and I didn’t hate it and I was able to grasp things without too much struggle. Interruptions aside, I got the rest I needed!
For capstone, I’m going to be building a web app with two of the friends I met starting the program and I’m incredibly excited not just to be working a project that is my idea but mostly to work with these two. I’ve worked with both of them before and I’m expecting it to be a fun quarter. I will also be working on a personal project for credit. As I have some real updates on that one I will try to post about it!