Insert life. Now press play. This is how I began my latest adventure just 3 days ago. I packed up my life in St. Louis (a total of 150 lbs in 3 different bags) and headed across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. My final destination is Barcelona, España, where I plan to teach English and establish residency in order to perfect my conversational Spanish for future career endeavors, whatever those may be. Dr. Carolina Acosta-Aluzur, a very wise professor whom I greatly admire, said something a few years ago that has resonated with me since. She wished that all her students “become conversant in a second language and culture. Diversity being it inside the U.S. or in the international arena, is a fact of life. Learning a foreign language and culture is a great way to realize these differences and embrace them. It helps us break damaging stereotypes that impede communication and understanding.” I attribute a large majority of my confidence and courage to take this big leap out of my comfort zone and move to another country to this wonderful woman. She helped me see outside the box and strive to be different.
As I figure out who I am, Matt (the boyfriend) is gracious enough to embark on that qwest with me. We begin this journey flying into Frankfurt, Germany where we met my brother Fletcher and will stay with him in his student apartment in Tübingen (southern Germany) until we can figure out a place to live in Barcelona. This picture is one of many I took to document my last few views of United States soil.
I must admit, I am not handling jet lag very well, and the all night techno dancing at the German discos are not helping establish a normal routine…thanks to my brother’s new lifestyle influence. As soon as we arrive in Tübingen (after 6 hours of train hopping) we shower, get on a bus and starting drinking on our way to Fletcher’s 21st birthday party his favorite bar in town was throwing him. No time to rest.
After two nights of back to back playtime, I hope to get some rest and figure out what this city actually looks like in the daylight, as I have yet to be awake and venture out during normal hours.
Categories: Europe
Leaving the college life and entering the work world is going to be a tough transition, however it is an inevitable one. While I do enjoy what free time I have now as a college student, which honestly is not much, I am eager to enter the consistent and steady world of work. Yes, I’m going to miss those late nights and lazy mornings, but I’m ready to publicly apply everything I’ve learned and gained at college. After all, it’s what I’ve been preparing these past four years for: the job.
While I do not have one just yet, I value every experience and responsibility I encounter along the way to help me prepare for this eventual endeavor. These are 5 C’s of Success I’ve found to establishing and maintaining yourself in the workplace:
- Character
- Class
- Confidence
- Competency
- Chemistry
For more detail on these, Listen to some tips to know how to function and manage yourself on the job. I am by no means an expert in this area, as I will have recently graduated, but hopefully the advice of a college kid can help those who will eventually be professionals out there with me.
Categories: Uncategorized
Social media 2.0 has taken the Internet captive. Anything you would have imagined to go into a communications strategy or PR plan four years ago has since been widened by the integration of social media.
Last month on March 1, 2008 The University of Georgia and Edelman joined together to host the Edelman Digital Bootcamp. College students from all over the state of Georgia had the opportunity to utilize social media tools hands-on in their own communications plans. This was a great way for students to learn outside the classroom about the wide range of social media tools available and then actually integrate them into tactics.
As a UGA student in the Word of Mouth Communication class, my role at the Bootcamp was to provide live social media coverage of the event throughout the day. This required using Twitter to give constant updates and feedback about what was going on at the event, blogging to sum up key points of the seminars and speakers, podcasting interviews with key attendees of the event, and uploading pictures to flickr to showcase visual highlights of the day. Check out this podcast to listen to an interview I held with a fellow UGA attendee discussing what he thinks are the advantages and disadvantages of social media. Every new communications medium has a positive and negative side to it, but either way, these tools are excellent non-traditional ways to dive into the media stream and get noticed: whether it be your company, your client, yourself, or a new product.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: 2.0, edb, edelman digital bootcamp, podcast, social media, university of georgia
This time it was my turn to visit my mom. With my dad’s recent employment and relocation to Wilmington, NC, I was tempted to take a quick drive (6 hours) from Athens to go and check it out. My mother still resides in St. Louis as we’re in the process of selling our house, so she flew in and we all met up. Even though my mother and I had just seen each other the previous weekend, we were happy to have more playtime together.
To continue our underwater sea theme, we took a trip to Carolina Beach, which turned out to be only 5 miles from their new residence in Wilmington. The beach is quite a detour away from the four-seasons (especially winter!) of the Midwest, but my guess is that it’s not going to take my parents too long to adjust.
We strolled up and down the sandbars aimlessly chatting of where our lives seem to have taken us, with my mother confessing she would never had projected in a million years that she would spend her life gradually moving east. She grew up and lived in California for 28 years, moved to the middle of the country in Missouri where she’s spent 24 years, and now will move to the easternmost coast for the rest of her life. This intrigued me to really appreciate the spontaneity of life. Whether we’re in limbo right now or not, it is a comfort to know that our lives are forever changing and everything will work out…even if it is the most opposite direction than we could have ever imagined.
Categories: Oooohhh life
Tagged: carolina beach, limbo, mother, north carolina, wilmington
It’s a common cliché to hear that “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” but after spending two weekends in a row with my mom (which has not happened since I moved away to college 4 years ago…), I have decided to re-write that line. Diamonds are nice, but mothers truly are forever.
My mother visited to Athens two weekends ago for our last mother/daughter sorority brunch we will ever experience together. We split our time half in Atlanta and half in Athens so she could experience the world’s largest aquarium first-hand: The Georgia Aquarium.
It’s easy to pretend you’re five years old in that place with so many tanks, fish, interactive videos and diagrams to run around being curious about. I don’t think I have never seen my mom’s eyes grow so big so fast and so many times in just two hours. It was a wonderful experience to be two grown adults acting like children together, not as mother and daughter, but as two girlfriends. I really never thought moments like this were possible once you reached a certain age/point in your life, however, it seems that this is when those exact moments begin.
Here we are posing with a starfish we found plastered to the glass:
Our weekend as girls, not as a mother and daughter pair, was an unexpected and incredibly pleasant eye-opening detour. Thus, I look very forward to more experiences with my mother as two friends. She is a wonderful woman and I can only look up to her. I was anxious to be with her the next weekend in Wilmington, North Carolina to play some more!
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: daughters, georgia aquarium, Mothers
