Sarah's Blog

Even after a long day of classes, writing papers, going to work, and sorority meetings I was SO down for a night out with a bunch of friends. 8 of us piled into my friends party van last night and started heading west to the beach. There has been a big meteor shower happening this week all around the world and we needed to get out of downtown LA and all of the light pollution in the city to see it.

There ended up being around 30 of us all gathered down in Marina Del Rey for games, music, and star gazing! It was awesome, we brought a ton of blankets and warm clothes, hot chocolate, and stayed up in the wee hours of the morning talking and lying on our backs watching the meteors fall across the sky.

The highlight of the night was the ride home. Picture 8 delirious people rocking out to Backstreet Boys, Black Eyed Peas, MGMT, and others. It was a crazy dance party in the party van and the perfect in the the night. Despite the fact that I was pretty trashed for the rest of the week, it was pretty wonderful.

I’m in a General Education (GE) class call Philosophy 262 Mind and Self: Modern Conceptions. The three main topics we’re going over throughout the semester are 1) The Nature of Mind, 2) Death, Immortality, and the Structure of the Self, and 3) Freedom and Human Action. It’s a pretty interesting class that deals with heavy questions about consciousness, why we are afraid of death, and what is free will and does it actually exist?

I just wrote a paper about a woman who was in a car wreck and lost her memory of the last two years. In the last two years she had met, fallen in love with and married her husband but when she woke up from her coma she couldn’t remember anything about the man who wore her wedding band. It was a pretty heavy topic to talk and write about and consider all of the implications behind this sort of situation.

It’s kind of nice being able to take classes in other subjects besides math and science when being an engineer. As much as I don’t really enjoy writing papers it’s really great having another outlet and are of study to think about critically. Though, I don’t think I’ll be taking another philosophy class anytime soon… all of the concepts and readings make my head spin.

Next week I have two midterms and two huge papers due before Wednesday. So naturally, I’ve been watching baseball playoff games, playing scatagories, getting dinner with friends, watching Greek on TV and in general doing absolutely no work. This isn’t entirely true… but sometimes when I have a million things to get done I try to spend as much time as I can having fun at the same time so that life doesn’t get too boring just doing work. I feel like so many college students get so caught up in work and everything they have to get done that they forget to have fun. I know going to classes, getting good grades, working hard and all that jazz is important but in the end what are you going to remember from your years at school? Not ISE 426-Statistical Quality Control! Or at least I hope not…

All of that being said… now I really have to go do work. Philosophy paper, here I come!

This weekend I went back home to Texas. Besides eating a lot of Tex-Mex and hanging out with family, I got to meet with three incredible business women to get advice on getting summer internships and my future career. All three women are my mom’s friends and she’s known them for over 20 years! All three have their roots in the oil industry but have their hands in other industries as well. One of them worked for 26 years at the same Big 10 oil company and was the highest-ranking female at the company. She is one of the few women that have been able to break the glass ceiling in the corporate world in the oil business. One of the other women has a petroleum engineering background and after working in the oil industry for 10 years decided to quit and start her own company from the ground up. Now she travels around the country doing consulting and training on Quality Decision Making and Decision Analysis. The last of the three women is the only one still working for an oil company. She heads up a lot of their sustainable development projects and has done a lot of work making the company more environmentally friendly.

It was so amazing getting to sit down and talk to these women about their impressive careers. They gave me a ton of great advice on what I should be working on as a junior looking for a summer internship. I’ve found that grades are important but networking is just as important. It’s all about who you know!

Sometimes I decide to make playlists on my iTunes instead of studying… here’s the playlist I’m running on repeat right now:

• Fireflies- Owl City
• Cowboy Casanova- Carrie Underwood
• Gunpowder & Lead- Miranda Lambert
• My World- 3 Doors Down
• Somebody to Love- Glee Cast
• Sink or Swim- Tyrone Wells
• Are You Happy Now?- Michelle Branch
• Happy- Natasha Bedingfield
• Never Say Never- The Fray
• Kids- MGMT
• Playing Favorites- The Starting Line
• Need You Now- Lady Antebellum

Now… back to studying!

I’ll pretty much take any opportunity I can to wear my cowboy boots. I really love being from Texas but I love living in California more. That being said… I get pretty stoked for any themed party I get to wear my boots. On my way up to San Francisco for the Weekender this year I stopped with 8 of my sorority sisters in San Luis Obispo for a night. While we were there we went to a line-dancing club called The Grad. It was probably the highlight of the Weekender because I got to wear a cute jean dress and my boots! The club was this basically a few bars and sittings areas surrounding a huge dance floor. There was country music playing and hundreds of college students two stepping… seriously, any chance to wear the cowboy boots…. so great.

Fight On!

Cowboy Boots!

San Francisco Fun

Turning 20 is kind of unnecessary. I mean… I can already vote, go to war, watch R-rated movies, get married… what’s the point of turning 20? I propose we make the legal drinking age 19, this way we have a string of birthdays that actually mean something. Age 17 you can legally watch American Pie, age 18 you can vote, age 19 you can drink legally. Doesn’t that sound better then the system we have now? Just a thought….

So just for a little background, I am a Coach for one of the Freshman Academy classes that all of the freshman have to take their first semester at USC. As a Coach I get to participate in all of the lectures and guest speakers the freshman go to. A few weeks ago my class had a guest speaker for the engineering writing program—Steve Bucher. It was a really awesome presentation on how to be an effective communicator and presenter. I’m not sure the freshman really grasped how important it is to know how to make good presentations and how to communicate ideas. As a junior, I’ve had the chance to really see how important it is for all of my classes, including my engineering ones. The week after I here Professor Bucher talk I had a huge presentation in my Writing 340 class and it was one of the first times I ever felt confident going into a speech. After applying a lot of the advice I learned in the Freshman Academy class I ended up getting and A on my presentation and now I don’t worry about public speaking so much… pretty awesome!