Today was a really nice day. Although I have to finish up my 5 page research paper I decided to take a break and spent the afternoon hanging out with my fellow blogger Steph with some really good pizza and the Bills football game. It was a nice chance to catch up and hang out, since we don’t get that much downtime to spend together relaxing.

Yesterday my sister and I ventured out to Rochester to see our other sister swim in the NYS swim meet for our high school. I haven’t been home in about two months and so it was nice to at least be able to see my family (even though I’ll be heading home in two days). My littlest sister (who really isn’t that little) just signed with the UB swim team so will be heading out to Buffalo next fall as a Bull! Nothing could make me more excited then having both of my sisters out here. It’s been a long time since the three of us have been in the same place for any extended amount of time and I’m really looking forward to being together again. My sister’s and I are extremely close so it’s like having my two best friends back together again. But yesterday was a lot of fun because both her and her team did really well so it was really exciting to be able to cheer them on. The only downside was that we had to jet out of there after her last event because I had to get to work last night.

Campus has really started to thin out. Although we still have classes on Monday and Tuesday, a lot of professors have cancelled their classes or made it not mandatory so a good amount of students have already started to head home for Thanksgiving break. Me, I’m here till Tuesday night BUT am counting down the minutes until I get to head home!!! =)

I have almost all of my programming requirements done for my Community Assistant job in Hadley. Each semester all of the CA’s have to put on a certain amount of programs for the residents; things such as diversity programs, educational programs and building specific programs. Last night was my Late Night program which means that it has to be held on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night between the hours of 8 to 11 pm.

Since the weather is starting to turn cold and everyone is trying to hold onto those last couple of days without our big, puffy winter jackets I decided to remind everyone where the weather is always warm and throw a “Night in the Tropics”. I went and bought a whole bunch of decorations from Party City, things like leis, flip flop table centers and blow up clown fish. There was a pretty nice turnout and we all ate Hawaiian pizza while watching “Cool Runnings”, the movie about the Jamaican bobsled team.

Yesterday I took the day off from my internship to get some life errands done. I can’t believe it’s almost Thanksgiving and I’ve got a ton of little things that I need to get done before I can start thinking about heading home! I’m so excited, I haven’t been home in almost two months so I’m going to really enjoy the couple of days to lounge around and have some good food with my family. One of the main things that I have to knock out before I can think about home is a small research paper due on Monday for my Legal Issues in Human Services class. It’s only five pages but for some reason I have found the hardest time motivating myself to sit down and actually write it. Maybe I’ll go try and chip away at it now…

Sunday night I gave up watching the first half of my beloved Patriots take on the Indianapolis Colts to see something else from out of Indiana.

Straight, No Chaser is an all-male acapella group that made a stop at UB’s Center for the Arts this past weekend. The show was awesome! I was all sorts of proud because a bunch of my friends, The Buffalo Chips (UB’s male acapella group) had the awesome opportunity to open the show. They did an amazing job, especially considering this year they welcomed five new guys to the group! Then Straight, No Chaser came on and were really entertaining and incredibly talented.

It was a sad end to the night to come home and watch the Patriots lose to the Colts by 1 point in the last couple of minutes to the game though. Gotta’ love football season!

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times, I couldn’t thank the people at UB enough for the amazing doors they have opened for me. College is a time to experience and take in as much as you possibly can and I have been trying to get my fill of everything I can get my hands on, especially with this year being my last.

After a lot of conversations with my Assistant Complex Director in the apartments about what I potentially want to do with my career, he asked me to attend a conference he was running over at Buffalo State College for Student Affairs professionals. It was a great opportunity because that conference is generally held for graduate students or professionals in the Student Affairs division of Higher Education. So I took a half of a day at work on Friday and went. The presenterswere very well respected people in their careers and had some really interesting and informative things to say. What was really awesome was the people that I got to meet. Because my boss was the one running it, he introduced me to a lot of great professionals in the Student Affairs area and I was able to have a lot of great conversations. It was an awesome way to make connections but also a really good chance to talk to people who are involved and working in the field that I may one day want to take a chance at.

Another really cool thing I did this week was on Friday night after the conference I hopped in the car with a couple of my friends and headed into a local suburb around here to try our hands at a deaf bar! The Buffalo Club for the Deaf gives deaf people in the area a place to get together to meet and hang out. We went to go push our sign language skills, to meet new people and let me tell you it was a really cool experience! The people that we met were some of the nicest and friendliest people I had ever met. I really surprised myself with how well I did communicating with only a couple of months of the class under my belt. I can’t wait to try it out again!

I don’t have much time to write because of course I’m working on Halloween but I hope everyone has a really safe night and attempt to enjoy the windy weather that Western New York has handed us for the night!

Last night was the third speaker in this years Distinguished Speaker Series lineup and UB welcomed the author of the award winning novel “The Soloist”, Steve Lopez. Now to be completely honest with you, I was not the biggest fan of the book when I read it. However, I was really impressed with his message to the audience.

Mr. Lopez started off his talk recounting the awesome experience that he had and has continued to have after he met a homeless musician named Nathaniel Ayers. I won’t divulge too far into the story line because not only is there a book out there but there is also a movie starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr, which I hear is pretty good. But the message that Mr. Lopez kept pushing was one of awareness for the mentally ill. Now I have a special place in my heart for metal illnesses just because I’m around it a lot in the work that I do and in the field of social work that I want to go into so for me this was an awesome thing to be hearing. You do not hear very often of people advocating for people with mental illnesses and I think that not as many people are informed as they should be about it, especially considering the growing number of our population who is struggling with one mental illness or another. It was just great to see someone taking a stance and getting the word out there.

I’m really enjoying the downtime that I seem to be collecting. My schedule lately has been VERY different than what I was juggling in the beginning of the semester. I actually have the next couple of nights off and although I have to work on Halloween, am looking to be catching a few extra hours of shut-eye this weekend.

This is why I love fall so much! It seems in just the last couple of days Western New York has embraced fall. It’s like the trees finally gave in and said “okay we’ll turn”. Everywhere you look there’s awesome yellows and reds and oranges. Plus the last couple of days it’s been consistently at like 60 degrees with the sun shining. Now this is definitely weather I could put up with for quite some time to come!

This past weekend I worked a lot (no surprise there). But I also registered for classes for my LAST SEMESTER AT COLLEGE. I’m not ready to talk about it yet-it totally freaks me out. My fellow blogger Akash talked about it a little while ago but I’m not ready to be considered an “adult” AT ALL. I feel like I should still be trying to choose my major or wondering how I’m going to get home for the next Christmas break, not trying to figure out last minute things on my grad school applications and reminding my parents to get hotels for commencement weekend.

My schedule next semester is nothing like I’ve ever taken before. I’m going to be completely honest with you, it’s kind of a joke. I have decided to only take 12 credits as I only actually need 2 classes to finish my degrees and am way over the minimum requirement of credits to graduate. That means that I only have classes from about 9:30 or 10 to 12:30 or 1 everyday. For me, I’m probably not going to know what to do with all of that free time (I’ll probably find something extra to fill it but that’s beside the point). I’m taking things like Self and Self Esteem (a psych class), the second part of Sign Language (I CAN’T WAIT!), an Urban Sociology class and Biopsychology. I’m excited about all of them except Biopsychology. I’m a psych major but I am very much a social psych girl. I just don’t get the brain and all of it’s inner-workings but it’s a requirement for my major so hopefully with all of that extra time I’ll have plenty of time to study!

And a happy birthday to my fellow blogger Steph who celebrated her 22nd birthday this past weekend!

P.S. Here’s a really cool signed version of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA” song. This is just a small glimpse at what awesome story tellers sign language speakers are!

Now  I hate to toot my own horn but I think I would consider myself luckier than most undergraduate students. Internships is something that everyone in college is encouraged to do. A chance to get a glimpse into the real world, make sure you know what job you want to one day do and network; internships are an invaluable experience that any undergraduate student can get involved in. But my major does more than just encourage us to take a glimpse into the real world, they require it.

Some student’s take what might be considered the “easier” internships. Ones that you don’t have to travel that far for, the hours are really flexible and you can sometimes knock some homework out while your at it. But when I first started thinking about my possible sites for internships I wanted to try and get as MUCH experience as I possibly could. I wanted to solidify what I thought it was that I wanted to do, wanted to meet people in the field and learn from their experiences. So needless to say I didn’t take the “easiest” of internships. Both of my placements have been in downtown Buffalo which by no means is far but is a little bit more time consuming to get to instead of just up the road at a community center. Last semester I was in the Buffalo City Courts as a C.O.U.R.T. consultant, helping people find alternatives to incarceration through vocational programs and rehab. I even got to try my hand as a liaison over in the Family Court building, sitting in on several child support cases.

This semester I have been shadowing a Child Protective Services Caseworker and I have a lot of mixed emotions about it but most of all I am grateful. This experience has taught me more then any textbook or lecture could have. I have seen the things that I am learning in class put to practical use through personal interactions everyday. Now, I obviously can not divulge much of what I have seen however, everyday I go home with new information, having learned something in the field that day. It is an incredible eye-opener and needless to say, everything in me is grateful for not only this experience but also all of the knowledge that I will be taking away from it.

I am one of the luckiest girls in the world! This Thursday marked my 21st birthday and I had such an awesome day! I got to take the day off from my internship so it gave me a chance to catch up on some of my schoolwork and finish my readings before having to take a midterm. Well I got a 28 out of 30 on my midterm AND got caught up on a whole bunch of work so it was a successful day!

Some of the different awesome things that I got to do include going to a showing of Avenue Q with my fellow blogger Stephanie! Avenue Q is a musical that was showing at the Center for the Arts here on campus. It was so funny! It is definitely not something that I would encourage our younger audience to go see without a parents permission but it was an awesome birthday present from Steph. I also got to have a delicious steak dinner with my roommates for my birthday. We all got together and had steak, mashed potatoes and broccoli. It was a nice change from the peanut butter and jelly on the go that my diet has consisted of lately. I also got a beautiful bouquet of flowers, an awesome picture frame and some delicious desserts! Overall it was just a great 21st birthday!

Saturday was Open House here on campus. I’m one who looks forward to Open House every year. Even though it IS a really tiring day I always really look forward to seeing everyone on campus and having all of the prospective students taking tours and seeing the academic department presentations. I hope everyone who stopped by UB on Saturday had a great time!

This post is going to be short and sweet because as I haven’t mentioned in a while (sorry Mom!) tomorrow marks one of the most important days in the year…my birthday! And my 21st at that so I’m running between plans with about a billion different people all while trying to not get too far behind on my schoolwork. Sometimes I think that they should just let us take a rain check on some assignments during times like birthday weeks but alas, that isn’t nor will it ever be the case.

On Monday a friend and I met for dinner in the Commons here on campus as we always do before our Monday night class. As we were walking towards the Natural Science Complex where our class is held and decided to cut through the Student Union because these October nights are getting a tad chilly. Just as we entered one of my friends caught my eye, called me over and told me to wait with him saying “you aren’t going to want to miss this”.

Well, there was a line of people holding signs, hiding the words from the crowd what they said. Just as I was starting to wonder about what was going on a  very dressed up looking fellow walked down the stairs with his arm around a girl. As they reached the bottom of the stairs the line of people flipped over their signs to display “Melissa, Will You Marry Me?”. He then got down on one knee!!!!!! The entire Union erupted into applause as this lucky girl nodded her head and started to cry.

Needless to say it was a nice way to start off my birthday week! I guess the fall weather just has us all in the mood to celebrate! Congrats to the lucky couple and thank you for letting us share in your special moment! Just goes to show you never know what you’ll run into walking around campus…