I haven’t written a blog post in a really long time. I have had an extremely busy and intense semester, which has challenged me a lot. I am so happy to finally be done with it, and I’m really happy about how everything has turned out.
I took on a lot of responsibilities this semester. Academically, I challenged myself by taking Swahili and Chinese (read about that here and here). That was really hard. I really love both languages, but it was really hard to split my time between them. I would have been much happier dedicating a lot more time to one of them. Next semester, I will be focusing my time on Chinese, which is probably good because it’s my degree after all. Oh yeah, and I’m moving to China in August.
I was also quite involved in peer support for Linguistics and Chinese, so I planned and attended a lot of events and meetings, which took up a lot of my time this semester, but definitely was good experience. I feel like I learned a lot about working with people, applying for grants, planning events, promoting events, etc. I also was co-talks organizer for the Linguistics society, so my friend and I planned 6 lectures this semester for the society. Again, these things taught me some valuable skills and were fun for the most part, but took a lot of my time.
After a lot of searching, distributing CVs, and applying for every job I could find, I finally found a job this fall. Well, actually three jobs. Granted, one of them is only about three weeks a year, but one of those weeks was this October, right around the time I got one of the other jobs, which is a freelance position at a company that makes a language-learning software. I also started working as a student ambassador this fall, which entails giving campus tours about every week and helping with special events at the university. Between all of those jobs, I stayed pretty busy. I really had to work on time management and balance this semester. I’m still not great at it, but it’s a work in progress.
Because of university and my jobs, little time was left to socialize this semester, but there were some great times. Our flat hosted a successful Halloween party and a huge Thanksgiving dinner.
I didn’t get any time to travel during the semester, even to nearby places. That was a bummer, but I’m definitely making up for it in December and January (and a bit in February, too!). More on that later, but it definitely feels good to plan some trips again. My next post will be all about my trip to Barcelona, which happened at the beginning of this month.
Personally, there were a few blows this semester. As always, people go in and out of your life, but I haven’t had that much experience with that, so I am learning how to deal with that. The biggest blow was the passing of my grandmother. It was extremely difficult to deal with that while being 4,000 miles away from all of my family.
It’s safe to say there was a lot going on this semester, but I think I grew a lot. There were a lot of challenges, but in the end I’m quite happy with the way everything has turned out. I feel like nothing really slipped and my grades should turn out alright, I feel like I did well at my jobs, and I’m feeling pretty positive about the semester as a whole.
So that’s why there wasn’t much on the blog. I hope to get back into it at least until term starts back in January.
