[tiffy trying] to finish a 15 page paper

One of my classes has an online discussion board where students are required to post their experiences for that work week, share insights they've gained, or pose questions to the class. In a nutshell, it's like an online forum meets blog meets official debrief meets support group. The following paragraph below is what I posted last Sunday night, regarding my progress on the 15 page paper I have to submit this coming Sunday night. It was apt then, and it still feels apt now.

T-3 weeks until I become a master of something!



My desk at my summer fellowship is a reflection of my brain at the moment.

A huge mess.

On Wednesday, I was finally able to get some detailed feedback from my mentor regarding the outline I sent her last week. This turned out to be good thing and a bad thing.

The good thing was that her feedback about ways to make the white paper better was incredibly helpful.

The bad news was that I didn't do too well on the outline. I had spent last week crafting an outline that ended up being too "nitty gritty." It wasn't necessary for me to write the steps out, field guide style. She could see that the information was in there but she wanted it reframed into something more strategic than tactical.

(Disclaimer: No babies were harmed in the production of this discussion post. 

My ego on the other hand… just kidding!)

So back to the drawing board for me. I spent the rest of the week editing the outline and writing the draft. I tried to recruit some minions so that I may outsource some of the workload to them. They weren't very helpful. 

But in all seriousness, based on my mentor's feedback, I ended up reframing it into a different, hopefully much better paper. Instead of getting into a crazy level of detail, I ended up following her suggestion of picking out a handful of challenges and then writing out the solutions that some experts have suggested. I supplemented these with examples so that there would be interesting anecdotes interspersed with the facts. It's a rough draft but I'm hoping that this is shaping up into something my sponsor company will like. 

To the rest of the class, I'd like to say... 

You can do it! :) 

<3,

Tiffy

[tiffy trying] summer semester: of me & memes

My spring semester ended a few days after my last blog entry. I had two short, blissful weeks of summer before the new semester and my work fellowship began. It's funny for me to be typing this now because in one month, my summer semester and life as a full-time grad student will come to an end. I'm having mixed feelings about this.

[on one hand, I'm thrilled that homework is coming to an end.

on the other hand, I'm sad to be re-entering the "real world" when academia's been so nice.

on the other hand, I'm excited to do something w/ everything I've learned AND earn an income!]

And what happened to blogging my grad school adventures?

[ image credit: Gemma Correll] 

Well, that kind of fell by the wayside... sort of.

I ended up replacing Blogger (temporarily, because I'm back! I think...) with a mixture of Instagram and Twitter. Instagram was a way for me to document some of the activities I've gotten into over the course of the summer, while Twitter was a way to keep tabs of my cutting edge (if I do say so myself) research project (for my fellowship) on the utilization of Social Media in Emergency Preparedness and Response. I'm still in the process of finishing this up but so far it's been such a wonderful adventure. I love doing research. I love social media. I love writing. And I love thinking about how communication can actually make things better. This research project allowed me to combine all of those cool things. I read a lot of news bits and post mortem analyses on events, reached out to key folks in the industry and got to pick their brains, checked out the DigiDocs center at the American Red Cross HQ, and got to use a mix of traditional research and social media to get all of this underway. I feel like I'm making great progress on the topic but I'm also enjoying the entire process that's going along with it. So, I already feel happy and rewarded (and exhausted).

Aside from that research project, I am immersed in two other projects for my other classes. One project is on rebranding a city to make it even more of a tourist destination. The other project is an environmental campaign to get DC grad students (like myself) to embrace reusable water bottles instead of purchasing disposable plastic ones repeatedly.

So far, I'm pulling A's in my classes. #HumbleBrag

[ Angry Expectations Asian Father would be pleased. 

I'm proud too because of all the hard work I've been putting in]

Moving on...

The non-academic parts of the summer have been wonderful. I oscillate between NY and DC during weekends exploring new parts of these two cities that I haven't gotten to see yet. I've gotten to spend a lot of time with K's family and my own family as my parents made a quick detour to NY to visit. K and I have gone on a lot of date nights to make up for all that time apart doing long distance. Together, we've managed to hit up a lot of the food events in NY, double dated with a bunch of other couples, attended two weddings, hung out with different groups of friends, squeezed in some time for fitness activities, and caught up on a bunch of TV shows (although admittedly my taste in TV seems to skew heavily towards embarrassing reality TV). On a more serious note, I feel incredibly happy that I've been able to balance all of these fun things with my schoolwork and still feel okay.

[ how I look like at the end of every week day]

Well, maybe not TOTALLY okay. I'm definitely exhausted as heck, but I'm utterly grateful for everything and extremely excited for what's to come, whatever that turns out to be. :)

[ I actually, for real, dance like that]

<3,
Tiffy