Summer Homework

Nobody on summer break wants to have homework.  Especially when it’s self-assigned homework.  That is what I’ve been slowly but surely working on this summer.  Two different self-assigned tasks.  The first one was by far the most fun and the second one is much more time consuming and important.

The first was working on a “Best Of Santa Barbara” guide for a friend at work who is transferring to UCSB this fall.  I thought that it’d be nice for her to have a quick cheat sheet for finding the best hangouts or restaurants.  I think that every school should have a welcoming committee for transfer students with a best of guide.  I know that I would have found one useful transferring to CSUB.  For the longest time I was driving to a post office 3.5 miles away when there’s one 1.5 miles in the other direction.  Oh well.

Today is her final day at work before she moves to SB so I gave her the guide yesterday when we both worked.  It ended up being about 10 typed pages which I broke up into different categories such as “Food & Drink”, “Going Out”, “Hobbies & At Home Entertainment” and “All About You”.  Then I had some fun with stickers.  So in the end it ended up being pretty cool looking and she was so surprised that she ended up tearing up a bit.  Go me, mission accomplished!  Not that my mission was to make her cry, more of to surprise her with something that she’d really like and be able to use.

My second homework assignment has been to investigate graduate programs for my masters degree in counseling psychology.  Quite a few graduate schools have psychology programs but about half of those are doctorate programs or are research based degrees.  So right there, I lose a lot of options.  Then I don’t want to live in Los Angeles so again, a reduction in options.  Anyways, I’ve been trying to determine where I want to go to school next and then potentially begin my career.

Right now my number one pick is Oregon State University’s program.  Their program is not on the main campus in Corvallis, Oregon (south of Salem) but in Bend, Oregon (east of the mountains).  Last week I was able to check out the campus.  Dad and I drove up in one day to my grandparents’ place in Bend and stopped by the school the next day to check it out and talk to a woman on campus about the program.  I was surprised at the size of their campus.

That’s basically it.  One big building.  But it is on the Central Oregon Community College campus so they apparently share resources such as the student union, library, and bookstore.  But the plus about there just being one big (and did I mention nice?) building is that in the winter I won’t be schlepping from one building to another.

Hopefully this will be a common sight this next school year.  And my “Don’t Be Trashy, Recycle” bumper sticker would be more congruent with the attitudes of Bend than those of Bakersfield.  But I won’t get into that now.

Loves.