Ardentli.Net

I decided to book my boyfriend and myself a vacation a few days ago to dun dun dunnnnn!

The Happiest Place on Earth

Disney World! I haven’t been to Disney World since I was a little kid and hardly remember it so this will almost be like a first time vacation for me there. My boyfriend’s been there before when he was in middle school, but regardless this is the first time for both of us going together as a couple rather than with our families. I’m quite excited!

Coronado Springs Resort

We’re staying for 7 days and 6 nights at the Coronado Springs Resort on Disney property! I bought us tickets to see all the main theme parks including Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom. We’ve also got tickets to check out the two water parks as well! ^___^

I’m sitting here super excited since I haven’t been on a serious vacation since senior year of high school let alone one I planned myself.  We’re leaving on August 30th! Hopefully the weather will be nice and we’ll have a great time. I’ll be sure to take tons of pictures and share ‘em when I return!

Additionally I’m in the final week of my internship now. My boyfriend’s driving up as I type this to stay the week and help me pack and move back to Rochester on Friday night. Hopefully we’ll be able to check out some fun stuff around Boston so he’s not bored here while I’m at work and he’s stuck in my house alone.

Time Limit MB is slowly getting repopulated with awesome people. The forums are still relatively new, but if you’re looking for a laid back and fun place to post, this might be the place for you. I shamelessly plug, I know.

Today at work as yet another sighting of the not-so-elusive old lady in the bathroom.

A little about said old lady: I shall call her Paula Dean, though I have my doubts she could cook me up anything half as delicious as the real Paula. This little old lady works on my floor at a huge financial company here in Boston with me. I don’t know her personally nor have I ever been introduced, and I have no idea what she actually does for the company. She’s probably in her late 50s or early 60s, short, has a solid head of white hair cut into a bob, and doesn’t ever really talk to me (probably cause bathroom time is Kim time and I don’t really want to chat while I’m trying to do my business).

I take a few bathroom breaks staggered throughout the day more or less thanks to my constant intake of coffee and tea to keep me awake on the long, boring days and, I swear, there is a 95.333% probability that on my bathroom excursion I will encounter Paula Dean in the bathroom near the sinks doing one of the following:

1. Staring blankly into the mirror
2. Washing her hands
3. Applying various types of makeup
4. Combing her hair
5. Blow drying her hair (not kidding, she brings in her own blow dryer)
6. Chatting with other middle-aged women in the bathroom

The first few weeks I thought it was coincidental that I’d run into Paula so frequently. Maybe we both had synchronized bladders and decided to take our breaks at similar times. As the second month rolled around it started to get kind of ridiculous. I would encounter Paula so often that it became kind of a Russian roulette with myself as I walked the 1 minute walk to the bathroom: “What will the little old lady be doing in the bathroom today?” and I’d try to guess which of the aforementioned she’d be doing this bathroom break. The funniest part is that if she was in a stall the whole time I’d think she just was old and had bladder issues. Makes sense. Old people have health problems. But no! Little old Paula is never actually doing business in a stall, she just hangs around the sinks doing her hair, makeup, or socializing it up.

I’ve come to the conclusion that little Paula doesn’t do much of anything here. I think she works on the business side of our floor, so she does have a real job/responsibilities. But herein lies the hilarious part about working at a corporate giant like I do – no one pays attention to you. I could leave work right now at 10:30am and not come back for the entirety of the day and no one would notice I’m gone. I think Paula has realized the same thing and has decided to spend half of her 8 hour workday in the bathroom doing her hair and makeup (cause you know you need to look sexy in your 60s). No one says anything because everyone takes liberties with the lax system around here and as long as that’s the case, the lovely bureaucracy of my company shall continue and Paula Dean will continue to stalk me in the bathrooms and make me uncomfortable fidgeting behind my stall as she sits there touching up her mascara.

I’m at yet another point in my life that could be dubbed a “crossroad” or a point where my life will take a sharp turn in one direction or another. The end of summer is fast approaching and I will be returning back to college to finish my last two quarters of classes (my university does a quarter system – not a semester system).  As of September, I will have exactly 6 months left of classes and I will graduate with my BS in Information Technology at the end of February 2010.

I kind of dub that point as event horizon. It’s the point where all things including light my life as I now know it will get sucked into a minuscule little point the adult world. After that point I have no idea what I’ll be doing. I don’t really have any concrete plans at all. True I have a lot of ideas of what I’ll be doing, but none of them are set in stone and that kind of bugs me. Below are the current possibilities:

• Decide that, for now, IT is a terminal degree and get a full-time job in Rochester as a software developer. I could potentially be happy with this or I could be miserable since I can’t imagine myself in a cubicle for the next 30+ years.
• Work for 6 months full-time to get some more work experience and then enter the IT-MS program. It’d basically be free due to scholarships, but I can’t help but think this moronic since I’m not sure I want to be an IT professional forever as mentioned above.
• Work for 6 months and do volunteer work at hospitals/pet adoptions so I can send in my application for Physician Assistant school starting next fall. It’s very competitive and there’s no guarantee I’d get accepted anyway. The career change would be intense, the graduate school expensive, and who knows if I’d actually like health care more than programming anyway.
• Go the more professional route and apply for the 1 year MBA program. I do think it’d enhance my degree and give me a more cut-throat edge in the IT business world, but once again, meh.

Either way I know I want to stay local. My boyfriend still has 3 more years of college to finish his BS/MS+co-ops and I don’t think I’d be very happy with a long-distance relationship especially if I considered moving back to the DC metro area (which I’m not planning on since I really hate that place. Too freaking sweaty, boring architecture, rude people). If I decide on stopping my education in 6 months I’ll probably end up with a house and a dog within a year, which is a nice thought, but who knows if I’d be happy with that either.

Bleh, I envy my peers who know exactly what they want to do after graduation.

I was never a huge coffee drinker before starting to work full-time. I always thought it smelled awesome, but tasted like poo. Regardless I started to drink coffee daily just to keep me awake due to me never seeming to be smart enough to get a restful nights sleep on work nights. Two years later, I still think coffee tastes crappy, but here I am as I type this with a cup of free office coffee sitting and pondering if I have some sort of psychological association between coffee and the work place.

Why do people like coffee so much? Does it actually taste good to people? I always put a ton of creamer in it and sugar so it doesn’t taste like battery acid. Ugh, and coffee breath is the worst. I just don’t understand America’s fascination with this narsty drink.

And as much as I don’t understand it, here I am drinking it.

I’m quickly approaching the end of my undergraduate days. I have, as of this very moment, 6 more classes I need to take to fulfill my undergraduate requirements and get my BS in Information Technology. This means I have two quarters left, no matter how you look at it, since the most classes I can take per quarter is 5. I’m thinking of just going for two slightly easier quarters and dividing them equally with 3 classes fall quarter and 3 for winter.

I’ve been contemplating my eminent future with a great deal of difficulty. What do I want to do after college? Jump straight into the working world? Pursue a graduate degree in Information Technology or a MS in Business? Stay in Rochester or go elsewhere?

I sat down with a notebook and scribbled down anything and everything career related that could possibly make me happy. A horrible realization overcame me when I realized that I don’t really want to work in the web and software development industry! Well, at least, not for the next 30 years. I like learning about it and I’ve enjoyed my past four years in college learning about computing, but it’s just not something that drives me or excites me the way it used to which is a real shame.  I can see myself working in the field for a few years, but I’m just not excited about the future of my career in this field.

I’ve been thinking about what else I can do career wise that would make me excited to get up in the morning and go to work. I’ve always liked health care and honestly I think it might be a better fit for me. Anything to stave off a life in a cubicle. I feel stupid for not realizing this earlier and doing something about it earlier in my academic career, but here I stand deciding to apply to graduate school for something wholly different than what I studied as an undergrad.

*takes a deep breath*

I am in the process of speaking with the Physician Assistant program at my current college. This fall they are starting their brand new BS/MS program (previously there was only a BS program) and they said I’d be a good, competitive applicant. This means another two years academically and a third year of clinical rotations.

Why PA? Well, I was strongly considering applying to MD school a year or two after graduation. Working full time, studying for MCATs, volunteering at a hospital, and then applying in a year or two. I then realized I wasn’t sure I was willing to make the 7+ year commitment to that study path and next considered nursing. I didn’t think I’d be entirely happy with that job wanting more surgical experience/autonomy in my field, so I settled on Physician Assistant which is a happy medium.

I could see myself happy and active in this field for many years.

Needless to say, the program’s competitive and the work, difficult. I’m working now to get a volunteer experience at a hospital near my college as well as some shadowing experience. I’ll also be catching up on some more medical courses over the next year before fall to get more background and better prepare myself to enter the program.

The path ahead is a long one, but I’m honestly relieved that I’m going for something that will honestly make me happy and not just something that would be lucrative. IT is a great degree to have and I know I could easily have a $55k+ starting salary, but it’s not what I want to do. Even though this will cost a lot of money (getting degrees ain’t cheap!), I think it’ll be worth it!

Wish me luck getting in this fall! ^_^