While most of my friends spent this three day weekend off adventuring all throughout California, I found myself pouring over textbooks in Doheny Library in preparation for a week of midterms. But while I was grudgingly studying, I remembered the motto “work hard, play hard” and realized that my 6 straight days of cramming for my challenging exams was merely the hard work I had to put in before all the fun I will have in the next few weeks. After Wednesday is over, I’ll be done with my first wave of midterms, and I have plenty of fun things to celebrate. On Friday I will be going to Viterbi Ball with a group of my friends, including many other Viterbi Student Ambassadors! The following week I have tickets to Hillsong United with Sarah Miller (check out her blog here). And who could forget the biggest celebration of all: my 21st birthday right before Spring Break!

Of course it won’t be all fun and games for the next few weeks, as I’ll be plenty busy with class and work still. But looking back to last week, I had so much fun spending time with friends after finishing an Accounting midterm. Last weekend I attended a Valentine’s Charity Ball in Beverly Hills. I met up with about 30 other USC friends on campus, and then we all took limos to the event. The party was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. There was a huge dance floor in the two-story, underground ballroom at the house, and I had so much fun dancing all night long.

Ballroom

USC friends

Hello there, Fred Weasley

In addition to all the fun I had at the charity ball, I also had fun last week at my sorority’s invite called KAT in the Hat. For this event, our dates are a mystery. Just days before KAT in the Hat, we each receive a hat from our date, which we have to make a costume around. All the girls go to the venue first, and then the boys arrive later. The fun of the night is finding out who your date is–by seeing which boy is wearing a matching hat! While madness ensued on the dance floor as girls searched for their dates, mine wasn’t hard to pick out. He was, after all, a fellow Viterbi engineer, and we were dressed as nerds. For part of my costume, I wrote science and math equations in Sharpie on an old tank top. The funniest part about my costume was that I opened up my old notebooks and wrote down real equations I’ve studied in class on my shirt. I also brought along a calculator and math puzzles book to the venue in case anyone dared to solve my equations.

The night seemed to sum up my motto for this coming week: work hard, play hard. Work hard in your classes, and you’ll one day get to use your notes as part of a costume at a party. Just kidding!