grad school – Page 2 – Letters From Liz.

Due to grad school being immensely demanding, today’s post isn’t about a specific year. Sorry for those who really like to see year-specific TBT’s.

Instead, I wanted to share a favorite memory of mine.

This memory takes place in the summer of 2016, aka one of the hottest friggin’ summers ever. I had just graduated college and got myself together to start grad school in the fall. Over the course of my senior year of college, I took two Acting classes to fulfill my drama minor requirements, and I met some amazing people throughout my time in that class. If you read my post about friendships, you would know that throughout my college career, I didn’t make friends. At all. I was excited to finally call these people my friends.

During the summer, we all decided that we needed to plan a hangout day immediately; we really missed seeing each other twice a week for school. After a month of getting everyone on the same schedule, we decided to have dinner in Chinatown.

This right here, is the Acting Squad. There were more of us in it, but we were the ones who were able to make it to our night out in the city. From top to bottom, left to right, it’s James, Tori, Yashira, Me, Liz, and Jalika. I met Tori, Liz, and Jalika in the first level of acting class, I met Yashira during a drama class we took my junior year of college, and I met James in the second class for Acting. Because we had an amazing professor (shoutout to Jed!), we were able to connect and become really close with each other inside and outside the classroom.

This night in particular, Tori had recommended we eat at this Ramen place in Chinatown. Definitely the best ramen I’ve had in my life. That’s not even an exaggeration.

Look at Jalika in the cut, tho.

After literally dying of laughter in the ramen place, we decided to extend our night and explore the city. We walked, a lot, and on the way we took some pictures together. (Funny story: we had a Chinese couple take one of the pictures for us. That’s how bad we all wanted to be in a picture together.)

This was totally the picture.

We walked all the way to Union Square, where I saw a #BlackLivesMatter protest happening there. It’s one thing to see it through social media, but to see it in person makes the effect of it feel more real. Instead of stopping, we just continued to walk some more, joke around some more, and stop in any place that appealed to us. Can you tell who picked to stop here?

f16511f3d2b3a261f77f55c082f85051

Even though we only did this once that entire summer, I will forever cherish us all being together. These people are the reason why my 2016 was amazing. These people allowed me to be myself and allowed me to be friends with them. They liked me for who I was, and I liked them for who they were.

Unfortunately, the group disbanded, and a lot of us are doing our own thing, dealing with our own classes. Tori and Jalika are wrapping up their last semester of college, Yashira transferred to a college closer to where she lives, while Liz and James are both dealing with their junior year of college. And then there’s me, dealing with grad school. Oddly enough, we all still attend the same college, but because of grad students being mainly night students, I only get to see Tori, who drives me to the bus stop on her way home. Out of everyone, I’m the closest to Tori; she was like my best friend of the group and we ended up just clicking. As for the rest, I see them doing their thing through social media, wishing that sometimes we could go back to sitting outside of 1P-218, talking and laughing and crying and rehearsing for our acting class.

This memory will forever be one of the biggest highlights of my 2016 because it’s something I will cherish for a long time. Whether we all grow apart or not, I will always be cheering them on in whatever they decide to do.

Love you guys.

Side note: I still wonder who wrote the tomato fantasy secret about Jed!

-Liz (:

For some of us, classes begin in the next week. While most of us think we want to go back to school, some of us dread the stress that college brings into our everyday lives.

People deal with the stress of college in their own, unique ways. Some people wait to the end of the semester to get all of their papers and projects done, and other just stress 24/7 about the assignments. I’m definitely the latter.

With the stress of college, it’s hard to balance out the other aspects of your life such as your social, financial, personal, and love life. Just because you’re a full-time college student, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a life outside of it. I’ve known many people who ditched their social lives because of college, and as a young adult, doing that isn’t the ideal thing to do.

I survived four years of undergrad studies, and now I’m shooting to survive my grad studies. Here’s how I deal with the college stress that comes along every semester:

Time management is crucial. When you’re taking four to five classes a week, sometimes it’s hard to get everything done within that time-span. Professors love to think that a student is only taking their class and pile them with assignments to complete in a short period of time. When you’re juggling five classes, with five different types of assignments to complete in a week, you don’t know where to start or how to get everything done on time. To help you manage your time, get yourself a calendar where you can write down the things that are due and what days you want to do each assignment. During my first semester of grad school, I had two very demanding classes that required a lot of my hours, so I used my calendar to write what days I had certain assignments due as well as write what days I was going to work on those said assignments. While writing my 24-paged Master’s Thesis, I chose one day out of the week for a total of five weeks to write at least 5 pages of the paper. It made my thought process a lot more organized and it was clear what I wanted to write about. Waiting to do something last-minute doesn’t give you the time to truly indulge in your creativity and intelligence.
If you’re not good under pressure, don’t try to look for a part-time job. During my second semester of my junior year, I decided to go for a part-time job at a theater production company during their show season. Due to my perfectionist qualities, I wanted to put my all in both school and my job, but it was simply impossible for me. After that, I decided to not look for a job while being in school; I wasn’t built to do both. I commend those who balance both responsibilities, but if you are a person who cannot handle the pressure of balancing both school and a job, don’t go for one. Yeah, having money is important, especially if your parents can’t help support you completely, but some things you honestly need to let go, and the luxury of having/making money is something I had to let go in order to complete school.
Know your limits. This coincides with my previous post above, but you should always know your limits with school and how much you can do. If you can’t do three classes a day for three days a week, go for two. If you can’t take late-night classes, look for morning/afternoon ones. If you can’t handle taking two literature classes at once (like me), then look into another concentration. Knowing your limit is extremely important to handle your stress; you already know beforehand what you can or cannot do, and you can plan ahead with those in mind. Keep in mind though that sometimes you have to test out the waters and see if you’re able to handle it or not. My last semester of undergrad, I took three different English classes, and I thought I was going to die because of it. At the end of the semester, I ended up passing all of them with straight A’s and landed a spot on the Dean’s List. Anything is possible, you just have to try it out first.
Spontaneity doesn’t exist in the college life. Plan, plan, plan! Keeping up your social or love life while being a college student can be difficult sometimes; I sometimes feel guilty that I don’t see everyone that I want to see because of the way I plan out my work days. (It’s funny, Obie sent me on a guilt trip earlier on Monday on how I only see him once a week.) Luckily, I plan ahead in what I want to do with the people I want to see. If you have a day over the weekend that you have for yourself, make sure to plan ahead on what you want to do. If you have friends who are also college students, you sometimes can’t expect them to be available when you are and ask them that day to hang out. Ask in advance and plan something. My “day-off day” during the semester are usually Saturdays, and I typically spend those days with my S/O because ya girl needs some TLC after a long, hard-working week. When you plan your outings in advance, it allows you plan around that on the days you want to work on school assignments.
The beginning of a semester can be scary, but try to relax. The worst thing that can possibly happen is that Amazon doesn’t ship the textbook you need for your class fast enough to use it for the following lecture. Even in grad school, your first week is “syllabus week”, which is just the class you can relax and get a feel of your professor and your classmates. Although in grad school, you automatically start working after the class introduction, it still isn’t the end of the world. You will adapt to your surroundings and this class will feel like the many others that you took throughout your college career. Just relax and keep an open mind about things when starting a new semester.

Whether you’re entering your first semester of college or your last, the college jitters exist for everyone. It seems like the work will be intense once you get your class syllabus, but ask yourself just how many times you said that about a class and it ended up being easy or just fine? The most important thing about college is being able to take care of yourself while taking care of your business. If you have experience simultaneously doing both during the semester, then you will be just fine.

I hope everyone has a great and successful semester! Cheers to the Spring 2017 semester!

-Liz (:

Tag: grad school

#TBT: Favorite Memory of 2016.