Rooming Stuff

I'm sitting here at my desk, which you know means that serious work is about t o happen. But, as I sip my coffee, I realize that I don't feel like doing any work. My roommate doesn't help anything. We started talking about ice cream, and all of that wonderful stuff. So my work ethic completely disappeared. But at least I had an idea for this blog!

This is gonna be all about my experiences with rooming and my roommate for this year. I had no idea how rooming this year was going to turn out. There was a lot of drama with the girl I was supposed to room with for this year, so we mutually decided that it wasn't going to be a good idea for us to live together. We just wouldn't have enjoyed this year, so we decided that she would room with another friend, and I would go into the lottery, and be put with whomever.

That was a very interesting situation to be in. The first girl I was put with was a senior. But my mom and I had problems with the fact that she would be allowed to have alcohol in the room, and I might get in trouble for it. Then I was put with two other sophomores like, but for some reason those fell through. So then they put me with my current roommate.

I was a little skeptical about being put with her. We're definitely different people-- most notably in our sleep schedules. I'll be snuggled up in bed at 11pm, but she'll still be up until like 3am, with no problem. But for some reason, we just work. We get along well, and laugh a lot. We're kind of into the same things, like we both love the same movies (Life is Beautiful, and The Pirates of the Caribbean series). And we both love our naps. So it works out a lot better than I think either of us thought it would.

It's great that sometimes the system works to your advantage. I'm friends with a great person that I thought I would never even talk to before.

I guess this is a 'good job EC' moment!

Horrible Couple of Days

Even though classes have only resumed on Wednesday, I am in dire need of another break. Or just a break in general. I decided to not go home for Midterm break due to the fact that I could get a lot of hours in at work, and that I needed the money.

I didn't realize exactly how much I would need the money when I was earning it.

Tuesday night, after spending two days working 9 hour shifts at the IT Desk, I was using my computer when it told me that my hard drive had failed and that I needed to back everything up to avoid losing everything on my laptop. This was probably the last thing I wanted to see. I had already spent a lot of money over the summer fixing the hard drive, so that I wouldn't have to spend more money to replace the hard drive. Now it's looking like I will need to replace the hard drive. Absolutely fantastic.

Once I made peace with this decision, and resigned myself to the fact that I would need to spend some decent money on fixing my computer, my watch broke. And I'm constantly checking it. So there's another expense that has to be dealt with.

So then this morning I woke up early. I thought it was fantastic because then I could go to the gym and work out my feelings like I did almost every day this summer. I was all ready to walk out of my room, when I discovered that I didn't know where my ID was.

For those that don't know, your student ID is pretty important. It's what you use to pay for meals with, how you buy your books in the book store, lets you use the campus' gym facilities, etc. Oh yeah. It's also your key to your dorm building.

Instead of waiting, because I had so many other things up in the air, I just had the new ID charged to my account. There was one problem dealt with. Then during work, they were nice enough to let me back up my computer so when my hard drive crashes, I'll be alright. They were also nice enough to let me write a Sociology paper.

Everything is looking up from yesterday, which is fantastic. I guess maybe having 3 hours of tap helped too. Tonight, after working two shifts today, I think I'm going to go to the season opener of EC Hockey. And then tomorrow, I have a nice full afternoon of volunteering.

Sounds like everything will be alright.

Psychology in Real Life....?

I think that my Personality class is shaping up to be my favorite class. It is a very notes intensive course, but I didn't have to buy a textbook for it (which instantly makes a class sit better with me) and we actually have fun, creative, crafty projects to do in it. For example, when we were studying Freud and his stages of development, we were assigned to make a board game based off of his theories. And if you know anything about his theories, you should know that doing an internet search about any part of it will yield some very interesting results. But I digress.

Personality is very interesting just because of the topic of it. It's on the individual level of psychology, so everyone in the class has something to say about personality. Especially on this one day. We were finishing up the psychoanalytic theories of personality development (as described by Freud, Jung, and Horney) when Dr. Maluso (the professor) posed a very interesting question to the class "has your personality changed since coming to college?".

Going against what we had just learned about how one's personality is set during their childhood, most of the class said yes that their personalities had change since they started college. One answer stuck with me the most. He said that he became 'freedom happy because [he] realized that [he] could do whatever'. A lot of people agreed with that-- both in good and bad terms. Freedom happy means that you could stay up as late as you wanted, without anyone telling you to go to bed. But on the opposite of that, no one is around to make sure that you get up in the morning to go to class. A lot of everyone's answers were along that vein- that their personalities did change when they went away to school. What I found quite interesting though is that a common thread was after being freedom happy, they were able to find a maturity within themselves that balanced out their love of freedom with the fact that they still had responsibilities that needed to be done.

Then I got to thinking about myself. Has my personality changed since being at school? Unlike almost of my class, I don't think my has. My junior and senior years off high school were much different than what you typically think of occurring. I worked a minimum of twenty hours per week during the school year, on top of being in 3 honors and AP classes both years. Plus I was also in National Honor Society and National Foreign Language Honor Society, and spearhead projects each year for both of those societies.

I guess that's pretty normal for most students here at EC, having a lot of extracurricular responsibilities. But the difference lies in the fact that I had a lot of responsibility at home too. For reasons I prefer not to disclose my junior and senior years of high school and even into my freshman year of college were tough on my mother. She got through them, thankfully, and is now better then ever, but she will be the first to admit that those years were tough on me as well. As a result, I had to mature earlier than most of my class, as well as a develop a drive that is still with me now.

I guess the reason I have been thinking on whether my personality has changed is because I'm seeing my younger cousins go off to school now. While making me feel old, it also makes me happy. One has just started their freshman year at Sacred Heart University, and the other is in the process of applying early decision to Virgina Tech. I feel like this is a missive to let them know that they need to do their best, no matter what gets in their way. 

IT Consulting

I realized that even though I have been blogging for around a year, I never really explain what goes into my job at the IT Help Desk. Well, I think I'm going to remedy that here and now.

First and foremost, my job is to help students and faculty with their computer issues, no matter what it may be. Sometimes my job stops after this step, because we don't support certain issues. Like, if your a student and your laptop breaks, and the screen doesn't work, we can't fix that. We don't deal with hardware issues for students. However, we will refer you to Best Buy or some other place that can do something about it.

For students, we really deal with software issues, whatever they maybe. If you can't figure out how to insert a header into a document on Microsoft Word, we can teach you. If you need help with iMovie or Photoshop, we're trained to help that as well. As well as many other things. One of the most important things we do is if you ever get locked out of anything (email, ANGEL, a school computer, etc.) we can unlock you remotely from our computer at the help desk. Pretty cool right?

It's pretty cool to help people like this. And I do believe that it is one of the hardest jobs on campus to have. I think you need a 3.5 GPA to be even considered for a consultant position, and you're not allowed to do homework on the job (this really stinks around finals time, but Kim and Patrick are usually good about letting you study for a bit). And even though you're on a computer, you're not allowed on social networking sites at all. So that's a hard addiction to break. At work, instead of being on those sites, you're expected to do tutorials which teach you the obvious and not so obvious stuff about common programs that people have problems with. Like inserting a section break so the numbering will be the way it needs to be on your 20 page paper (which I don't need to worry about this year-- thank heaven).

I mentioned Kim and Patrick. Patrick is a GA so he is like a supervisor I guess (I say this because he 'fires' me all the time and nothing happens). Kim is my boss I like to think. She's pretty cool, but when she says that she has a project for you, you'd better run the other direction.

Then there are the guys out in the back-- JC (which gets confusing because my friend JC [who is a girl] works as a consultant with me), Nick, Neil, and Charles-- they fix networking issues, ANGEL problems, and anything else that we can't handle almost immediately up at the desk. Dave and Scott work on the multimedia issues (like if you need a projector or something for an event, they will try to make sure that you get it). Scott and Charles also double to work on student's computers too. Sometimes there's a virus on a computer that is too tricky for a consultant to remove (for me, that's all the time). They know what their doing and can make sure that your computer is back in great shape. I know. Because Charles has done this for me once before and it made my day

I guess this is IT in a nutshell. If you need to know more about it, you can feel free to contact me, or even call the help desk at extension 1915.

Realization

At EC I’m either running around like a chicken with no head, or I’m doing nothing…at all. 

 

What I haven’t realized yet is whether that’s because of me or the teachers.

For the past three weeks, I haven’t had that much work to do at all. Ok, so there has been Spanish homework every single night (one night I did it entirely in French…), but beyond that I’ve had no papers assigned, no questions to answer. Just some reading assignments. I could easily keep my head above everything, even with seven tap classes, Circle K, Salvation Army, SAB meetings and work.

And then this week happened.

Monday came, and I got slammed with a Spanish presentation, a Spanish quiz, sociology worksheet, sociology observations and writing a paper based on said observations, making a board game based on Sigmund Freud, and a pop quiz in a level 3000 class. And then I also had Encore, and the meetings and work that were enumerated before. Woo. I’m tired just from reading that. 

So yeah. I am running around like a chicken. Or a gerbil. I don’t really know anymore.

Monday I got the observations done (I watched an EC men’s soccer game and called it research—not bad, huh?), along with most of the worksheet and wrote out the presentation. So that’s put me in a great place for today. Assuming that I can fake a Spanish accent. 

Here goes nothing!

Bye Bye Summer

Summers over. It makes me kind of sad actually. It’s more than the usual feeling of getting back into a routine for every day. This summer was definitely one of the most relaxed ones that I’ve ever had. That doesn’t mean it was relaxing though. I did a lot, even though I wasn’t working a formal job.

I considered my job for the summer to be losing weight. And it worked. I ended up dropping 30 pounds through changes to my diet (thanks to the structure of Weight Watchers), and exercising more. For the past couple of weeks, I have been running two miles a day, lifting weights, and walking two miles a day as well. And that was on top of all the running around that I normally do.

My mom had her hip replaced this summer, so I was basically in charge of the post operative care. That meant running to the Pharmacy every day (they pretty much know me by sight now), supermarket shopping, cleaning, laundry, and the like. So it was basically like living in a dorm room, except caring for two people. And it was only for about a month.

But I did manage to do some fun things too. I managed to see two Broadway shows for less than $60 altogether. We had orchestra seats for both shows. The first one we saw was ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’ with Daniel Radcliff. It was a very good show, and we got $20 front row seats. What could be better?

Then, I went to see ‘Catch Me if You Can’ because it was closing. We got $20 row E seats. It was amazing. I think I need to see the movie now though.

I also went hiking. I cannot even begin to describe how beautiful the views were. It made getting stuck between rocks worth it.

And then, probably not even a week later, I went to my friend’s brother’s Rock Camp Concert. I swear, that kid will be famous some day. He can play the drums like nobody’s business. Later on, on that exact same day, that same friend and I went to an Improv Comedy show. It was the second time that I had seen it, and luck of luck, I got called up on stage to participate in a skit.

I was a gopher paleontologist that smokes baby harp seals. I think that warrants the look I was giving.

Those are the pictorial highlights of my summer. Oh. And the fact that I did yoga too. But I was too busy being upside down to be able to get a picture of that. Suffice it to say that it was great, and it’s something that I would do again in a heartbeat.

Maybe a potential Term II class?