Summer

It is now summer and things are looking to be pretty peachy.

The past semester for me has been quite tiring. I did not get a lot of sleep and was often times lacking in motivation. I did have a decent social life though and made some decent new friends. Definitely a lot more friends than when I was at Shoreline for the two years before Georgia Tech. I ended the semester with a lot of uncertainty in terms of my grades. And at Tech, the difference between an 89.9 and a 90 (79.9 and 80 etc) is one whole GPA point...there's nothing in between. For the most part, all my grades were hovering around those marks. I had a very high B in Studio, which was very, very disappointing. I had a low A in Chinese, a low B in History of Architecture, and a solid A in CS. My Chinese and History finals were extremely hard and I did not know if the A I got on my final exercise in studio was high enough to pull me into the A zone. The only class that I knew what I was going to get was CS--which thankfully was an A.

I left campus with an uncertainty and really didn't know what to expect. Fortunately, I managed to pull out all As and one B, a 3.76--what I was hoping to get. This usually never happens because before, I would usually get the lower end of what was possible for me to get. It would have been much less surprising had I gotten one A, two Bs, and a C--a 3.0. I was very satisfied with my grades this semester because I have never actually done this well before for an entire semester. I would like to keep up with this consistency too. I hope this will be able to serve as some sort of motivation for the semesters in the future.

I have also been fortunate enough to be able to get a summer internship at an architecture firm in Shanghai. This also allows me to register for summer credit because this internship relates to my major. I will be getting 12 class credits since I will be interning full time--and I get paid!. Of course, I'll most likely be paid very little being in China and all, but some is still better than none. In addition to all this, I am starting to pick up some steam with my photography as well. Over the past semester, I have managed to make over $100 in selling prints as well as earned over $200 for shooting an event. Hopefully I will be able to build upon this and start to earn a little bit of income to help fund for my photography hobby as well as to just help out with some extra cash.

Things are finally starting to turn around for me I think. The past few years have been very hard and I am very glad that it seems like I have weathered the long storm and made it out on top. However, I am still very cautious...I've seen 'The Perfect Storm'...