Month of October becomes unbearable

Hello everyone. I know I originally said that I was going to use this blog to talk about my education abroad internship and experience. And I want to. The truth of the matter, though, is that I severely underestimated this semester in terms of workload and time consumption. As such, I'm going to have to devote the majority of my time next month to working on my capstone project so that I can graduate. That's not to say that I'm not going to be continuing with my internship, I am, but it's going to be in a mitigated role. It will consist more of sitting in on advisement appointments and helping the guys organize the students by making spreadsheets for them, because that's really all I have time for.

In that light, I thought it might be interesting for some of you to see what all I'm doing with my Mobile Journalism Tools capstone project. Essentially, we're testing out tons of equipment, writing reviews for them, and them putting them online. Each week I'll be posting a review I've done, so that you can get a feel for how we do it here at Mizzou. I'm going to call it Month of Mobile Journalism. I hope that you enjoy!

As far as the internship is concerned, I'm learning lots. There's just so much to wrap my head around, and it seems like they work at 100 miles an hour every second of every day. Still, they laugh a lot, and the atmosphere is light, so I can't complain really. Just looking forward to helping out with some of the big orientations. I feel like that's going to be the most useful. I wish I could go to NAFSA this year, but I doubt I could swing missing three days of school for an education abroad conference. Sad days. Still haven't told the parents really about my future change of plans. I'm sure that's going to be a fun conversation.

Yay, glad I'm thinking about that now...

Internship heats up

Things are really starting to get interesting. I'm noticing more and more how much they need me over there in that office. It's not that I'm just doing menial labor, like they can't think of anything for me to do, so they just set me to a random task. This is stuff they would have to be doing, and frankly, I'm not sure when they would find time to do it. No, I'm taking a lot of heat off of them.

But that's not the interesting part. I contacted the ISC to discuss the Health and Safety Orientation, and I discovered that they would rather just pass the materials to me and let me go. So I'm going to be giving this presentation mostly on my own. It's a little bit nerve-wracking, because this is a pretty important orientation, but it's also very, very exciting. I'm taking the lead on this, and nobody seems to doubt or mind that I'm going after it. I just hope that I'll be able to manage it.

Something that's been on my mind, and I've suddenly started discussing it with other people. I think I may stay an extra semester. John and Kip have told me that they will continue letting me work with them. And I could work full time to put some money in my bank for when I do go. But I DO need to go. I don't enjoy pushing this date back, because a little part of me is afraid that now, it's going to keep getting pushed, but I have to believe I'm going to go. If I don't, I know in 20 years it will be the single greatest regret of my life.