Memories I am afraid I'll forget

Day 55, Memories I wish I forgot

To be honest (with myself, too), I may have just realized why my entries are dull. I started being afraid of journal writing. As more and more good things keep happening these days, I am afraid of writing them down and ashamed to feel them or let them in, because who knows what will happen tomorrow?!

But you cannot live your life in fear, right? I'm getting over this today and write up the least two days' memories. (I did, they were still dull.)

It's 5:30AM and something really loud is waking you up. Can you relate? It was that sound. The alarm. But at least now I had something good to wake up for. 6AM (9AM East coast time), we had our orientation of the SUSI Capstone program. I make it short and state it was rather a COVID-19 orientation or how many tests and when we should take in order to stay safe. I appreciate their concerns, but really hope we'll survive without somebody contracting the virus. It would kill the fun, for sure.

Seeing the friendly faces of my fellow scholarship junkie colleagues was great, so you can imagine what it would be like to finally meet them after a year and a half. We're looking at of some real team building in Boston, Amherst, and New York. It came as a surprise that we'll have classes too, but I guess if it is an Amherst, UMass, Harvard, or MIT teacher, you do not want to complain or be left out, right? They will also immerse us into community work, a.k.a. volunteering, which I am really looking forward to.

Once the meeting was over, my work instincts kicked in. I still had some Ulysses project things to work on, to somehow make a webpage deemed useful and worthy enough by the national agency, too. Working excruciatingly long hours on the webpage, I now completely agree with all the criticism we got on it.

I was finished by 10AM with all the emails regarding Uly, so I turned my attention to interviews. I had three of them scheduled for today and only one got cancelled, so that is a fairly good ratio, I consider successful. I had amazing conversations with international students, who had an extremely varied experience on SJSU services. The more varied the better for my research, I believe. The second student I interviewed even volunteered to help me with the research and be my TA. How cool, right? All those ambitions I see here is amazing! Ok, to be honest, he was a master's student – that might explain it. But it does not make his intentions less amazing. We'll be meeting next week and fixing up ideas on how to collect more survey responses and interviewees from SJSU international students.

In the afternoon, I had bigger fish to fry (if we can even compare the fish anymore). I was in a research group with this amazing Spanish colleague of mine (Adriana), and we are working on an article together. I wanted to proceed with the research, so I started looking for articles on the basis of which we can determine the final research directions of our paper. I would not say I had fun, I found it extremely boring and time-consuming to search for quality articles in the topic. After 2-3 hours of searching, I started not exactly enjoying, but bearing with the process, and I found 10 articles that matched – at least somewhat. But what I revealed during my search was the fact that if somebody wanted to study culture and HEI service quality, the paper we wrote together with my British colleagues was a must to reference. It is nice to find something like that out. We are inevitable. Like Thanos in the Marvel Universe. This inevitably (lol) kept me in a better mood and much more motivated to work on the secondary research.

I finished work at around 6PM (long working day, huh? from 5:30AM to 6PM – you jealous now?) wrote some journal entries and realized that the working day is not over yet. I still had a meeting at 11PM with my colleague from Austria, so that we could discuss the Ulysses webpage. Thank God that is a topic I like working on.

Hubby update (yes, I think I'll just call apartment update hubby update from now on, makes much more sense): Heating was turned on today! Yaaay! It was getting cold, he said. And if he was cold, I would have been frozen by then. His best friend also made plans for our garderobe room, and I loved it! It had all the functions we could use extremely well. How exciting! I would love to be home and help them assemble the room, though. I love assembling things, as my dad is an electrician and a forever DIY person. My whole childhood was about assembling things, so I miss it.

Tomorrow's plans: I have only a few plans workwise, so I might have the time to 1, either work on some publications or 2, go to the international week's classes. I only had one interview coming up at 2PM.

19 October 2022