Hi, folks. Still not dead. Sorry in advance for the... very long ramble under the cut.
I just finished up my last final for the Spring semester earlier today, so I’m pretty much done with all of that. I honestly meant to check in sooner, but those classes, while not as soul-crushingly terrible as some of the ones I’ve had recently, still ate up a lot of my time.
So after all that, I’ve got three things left to do before I finish my Associate’s/Bachelor’s+Double Minor in German and Chinese Commerce. First is an internship, which I’d thought I’d completely failed at getting until the Eleventh Hour for Summer Registration. I did manage to get one, though, with the state even (and paid!). It’s set to take up a good deal of my time until the end-ish of June (AKA the first block of Summer semester), and my first official day is tomorrow. I’m a bit nervous about what I’ll be doing, and managing my ~2 hour each way commute to the capitol building, but there’s not much I can do about it now but try. Right?
I really, really didn’t want a full schedule for Summer like last year (that really did not go well for me) so I only signed up for two other things. One is an online computer class that runs the whole summer (which I’m hoping to work on while commuting on the train), which ideally shouldn’t be difficult. The other one is the second of the three things I need to graduate; it’s another business class (sigh...) subbing in for an Intro to Chinese Commerce class that I’ve just never seen the university offer (and I’ve been watching, and waiting...). It’s about cross-cultural communication, which hopefully won’t be too onerous/business-filled for my brain to handle; it’s scheduled for two evenings a week in the second half of Summer semester, so it (hopefully) won’t interfere with my internship (there’s one iffy day that I need to check on, but otherwise it should be fine). This should leave me with some time, though, for things like maybe regaining some of my sanity, or writing. I really hope so.
Anyway, after that, the only thing I have left to do is one upper-level German class (the professor that does the upper-level German stuff is taking students on Study Abroad over the Summer, so they won’t have a German class that would count for me until the Fall. So I’m already set to learn about the Weimar Republic when Fall comes around, and added another computer class (I’ve been using them to fill out my credit hours/holes in my schedule for a while now), and a random class about Urban Planning which I probably shouldn’t take but it sounded interesting and I don’t know. I guess I like suffering. But even then, I’m still not full-time in the Fall (like three quarters-time, bleh), so hopefully I’ll have a little bit of breathing room.
Even if it makes me concerned for how my Financial Aid will work out; I may have to take out more student loans to cover the difference (there’s a good chance I won’t get my Work Study job back in the Fall, because I’ll be graduating mid-’school year’ and won’t be registered in any classes for Spring, and you need to be registered as a student to keep a Work Study job.
It depends on how things go for my (nor past-) supervisor. If they want me, I’ll come back, but they may not want me.
But yeah; I’m currently on-course to graduate in the Fall. After that, though...
So, I want to work for the government, ‘be the change you want to see in the world’, and all. To do that, realistically, I need a Master’s degree. My current university technically has a Master’s of Public Service (MPS) program, but it’s geared toward a very different end goal than mine, so I need to switch to another school with an MPS program. There’s another (bigger) university up north (not too far from where I’m interning, actually) that has the right sort of MPS program. It’s pretty well-rated in general, actually, which has me a bit worried, really.
You see, being a ‘better program’ means that this northern school is more selective about what students they let in. So I’ve got to fill out applications, get references etc., but I also need to take the GRE exam, to show my ability to be in a graduate program. So I’ve got to do that sometime after I graduate, and hope like crazy that they’ll let me in for Fall next year.
Then I get to start into school again for a couple more years, joy of joys, only now with a longer commute both ways on the regular (hopefully that university has some sort of transit pass/plan thing...). I’m not sure how Financial Aid applies to graduate programs, so I may also have to try and find some sort of part-time job as well (I hope not, but I shudder to think what sort of monstrosity my student debt’s going to turn into otherwise).
I try not to think too much about life after college, because of the whole ‘don’t count your chickens’ thing, but also because the whole thing just seems so enormously daunting when I try to look at the whole thing all at once. Too much to ever manage.
I want to make the world better, in some small way. I know I don’t have the charisma/temperament to be a leader, and I’ve come to accept that my language skills will only ever be middling at best (not enough to cut it in this state, with a lot of people speaking way more languages much better than I could ever dream of), but still. Whenever my family’s gone camping, my grandparents would always talk about leaving a place better than the way you found it. I’d like to find somewhere where I can do that, in some way.
I’d like to make enough money to be comfortable (not extravagant), and take care of my parents before my father literally works himself to death and my mother completely falls apart physically because medical bills have already bankrupted them. It makes me sick, watching their lives crumbling while I’m still in school, knowing I’ve got years ahead of me still before I can help more than superficially. Do I want the stress of feeling responsible for supplying their retirements? Not really; I’m already a wreck of a person. But I know I’m probably going to be the one person out of all my siblings in a position to handle it, eventually. The rest are either in fairly low-paying jobs or employed in an unstable industry.
It’s probably hoping for too much, but it’s what I’ve been trying to work toward. And there’s so much pressure to try and finish up faster (I already started college much later than pretty much everyone I know), but I know I still have years to go.
So I’ll focus on tomorrow, instead, on this new internship. And maybe I’ll have some time to catch my breath and finish a story or two this summer.
