[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 

[tiffy trying] to do homework & not get distracted

I'm so easily distracted it's not even funny.

It's the third week of grad school and so far I've been holding my own in terms of staying on top of all the reading assignments and getting my requirements in on time. Today, I had a paper and an oral presentation for one of my classes which were based on a journal article that I found, summarized, and critiqued on positive organizational behavior. The article talked about the importance of effective communication and positive organizational culture for companies to effectively weather crisis situations. Effective communication referred to openness and transparency from management so that employees could see that they were credible and authentic and would not lose morale during challenging times. Positive organizational culture was said to stem from the values of company CEOs (who are living personifications of the brand's culture and what it stands for). If a CEO was said to be hopeful, optimistic, and resilient, those values would spread through the company and those corporations were statistically shown to be more able to turn crises into opportunities for change and renewal. I believe that having good core values in a company that are embodied and practiced by the management can lead to a strong corporate identity and a cohesive work place where employees will be more motivated to add value.

I wrote pages and pages about that stuff relating it to the lessons and throwing in my own opinions of it. I love reading journal articles like these because they have practical real world applications. I read a ton of other articles for class that are more theoretical in nature and those aren't as fun. Most of these articles end with a call to do further research on other related topics because the subject matter is just too broad to cover all the areas. I feel nerdy for enjoying most of my school readings although part of me wishes that I could read faster just to get through them all. There are way too many pages of reading per class and sometimes that can get pretty overwhelming.

Tonight, I'm in the midst of writing a reaction paper. It's a 2 page paper but it's a lot harder than the long papers I've had to write in other classes. Distilling many points and ideas into something that short and concise is probably one of the more difficult things I've had to do. I'm a pretty wordy girl and editing these sentences is taking a lot longer than it ought to. And now I'm on the blog typing away. I guess I have all this text to get out of my system!

On an unrelated note, I am struck by how some things seem to simply "fall into place."A random memory popped into my head a few hours ago about how I desperately wanted to be an English major in college. I remember telling my parents about this over the phone and they responded by asking me to pick a "more practical" major. What could I possibly do with an English major? Fast forward to 2013 and here I am taking a Masters degree in Communication. It's like being an English major but with more up to date literature (and a fancier diploma, I'd imagine).

It's times like these where I sit here and feel an immense sense of gratitude that I've managed to get here and that I'm actually loving it (despite the temporary bouts of homesickness and loneliness).

And on that note, I have to stop typing on this blog and start finishing my paper so I can get some sleep.  I have a long day of homework to get through tomorrow so I can max out another weekend in NY with my family.

<3,
Tiffy