Tag Archives: Cal Poly

Graduation

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Today is the day when I finally, after a very long time, finished school. For the past five years my occupation has been student, as of 2:15pm today, I am unemployed. Two years at Chalmers, two years break, and one year at Cal Poly. It’s crazy. I postponed my graduation day by moving to San Diego for a year to work as an au pair, I didn’t feel like I was ready to start being an adult with a full time job, and I still don’t honestly. But here I am, a supposed-to-be-adult. It feels great, even if I am not sure what I want to do, it feels so good to be free and have a whole new phase of my life ahead of me. It’s exciting and I look forward to see what my future brings me. If everything goes according to my dream plans, I will spend the next six months in Sweden, working at Liseberg and study German at Gothenburg University for a semester, celebrate Christmas back home with family for the first time since 2012, and then move to Australia for an undetermined amount of time and then travel around in Southeast Asia for a bit. If all of this happen, I won’t be too sad about leaving California. But I will. Today is my last day in San Luis Obispo. I would have liked to have a whole weekend here without anything to worry about, but at the same time, everyone is so stressed about finals and packing. And it wouldn’t be fun to miss the weekend in San Diego.

So today I had two finals. First Digital Cities, a very easy one. The second one, Land Use and Transportation Studies wasn’t as easy but I answered all the questions and will definitely pass, probably get a B even. Now I just finished laundry so I guess I will have to pack those “clean” clothes in my suitcases and be completely done with all of that tonight so I can just leave tomorrow morning.

The rest of this week has been crazy. I had the German final on Monday which was very hard, but it was only a small portion of our grade, so it wasn’t too bad and I still got an A, so that’s good. I found out that I was on the Dean’s List last quarter. You are on the Dean’s List when you have a GPA of 3.5 (max is 4) or higher. I feel proud of myself honestly! I went to TRX Monday and Tuesday as usual, and just because it was the last week, the instructor Sophie tried to kill us. Monday was Filthy Fifty. Ten different exercises, 50 repetitions of each. We ended with 50 burpees and I thought I was gonna die. I have been so sore and it just got worse after Wednesday. I walk like an old lady right now, haha. On Wednesday we did something similar, but we rotated more. Six different pairs of exercises and switched between the two until you were done with the 30 repetitions (first five, then ten, then fifteen). Then you moved on to the next pair and did that for the whole workout session. Kinda a little bit like Dirty Thirty. I didn’t have time for the last 15 back lunges with a medicine ball. But I wasn’t too sad about that. Sophie was so funny with the medicine balls, we had to run around with them to the different stations, she called the balls our babies, we could never leave them behind, never. And if we did we had to do five burpees, we could also not switch babies. Haha. She’s funny!

I think I need to get back to packing before people start coming over to say goodbye.

It feels kinda unreal, am I really done with college?

Bike Night

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This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my two years in California. This full post can be found here.

It took me a solid nine months before I actually did this. But the last bike night of the academic year was happening tonight and I felt like I had to do it. And it was fun! I met up with David and some of his friends at his house, they made me a tinfoil hat (the theme today was time traveling crystal formal. We dressed up like we were from the future I think. Everyone had different hats, well, there were two sharks, two sticks, one two-pair-eared bunny, and I got to be Willy from Free Willy with a bent fin, haha. The event started at 9:30pm downtown SLO. And what we did was pretty much drive around downtown for an hour. There were so many bikers!! Several hundred? It was crazy, and fun! I stayed for an hour, I felt like I had to have enough energy to drive all the way back up to PCV. On the way I stopped by Slodoco and bought a donut. I felt like it was worth celebrating after my last day of class ever! On my bachelor degree anyway, I will be back in school in the fall, but that’s different, that’s because I want to.

That’s also a big thing, today was the last day of classes. Most people would probably call it bittersweet, but I actually only feel like the word sweet is flowing through my head right now. I am over school, I wanna leave this part of my life behind and start a new part.

The presentation today went okay I would say. Not the best presentation I have ever given and I actually completely lost all my words for a while. But I just breathed, apologized, read on my notes, and started again. Not too bad. And I can’t say how relieved I am that that class is over, except for the final, which I am not super stoked about, but I will manage.

I took a nap today, even after sleeping for many many hours last night. Or maybe it didn’t add up to that many hours. I went to bed at 8:30pm because I was tired and bored. I got woken up by loud roommate a few times though and the second time I had a very hard time falling back asleep. It’s nice that people can be considerate…

This weekend is gonna be weird. I have been invited to several goodbye parties, but I have a lot of stuff that I actually need to do. And since I stopped drinking I don’t really feel like hanging out with drunk people. I will see what I will do.

I think it is time for me to go to bed now, I am very tired actually. Or should I start Guild Wars 2? Tough nightly decisions.

Bike Night The first Thursday every month, after Farmer’s Market, this Bike Night has been happening for the past 15 years. That’s a long time! Bike NightThe tinfoil-gang and some others. Bobby, Thiago, Aarshdeep, Jen, Alex, me, David, and two others.

Study, study, study, study…

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Right now is not a fun time for me. These past two weeks have been so hectic with so much to do. One more day, and I should be able to forget about school for 4 days. I can’t wait!

Today I spent almost 14 hours on campus studying and being in class. I have a German midterm tomorrow and I don’t feel prepared enough. We didn’t get enough time, or I was too busy with everything else going on right now. I can’t wait for school to be over in three weeks! There was a project due this morning in Land Use and Transportation Studies. We were pretty much done, just some formatting in Word. We did adjustments to the intersections but the teacher looked at us like we were stupid when we told him about them. He told us to be professional about it, and honestly; how the fuck can we be professional about something he never thought us?? I am so upset with this class and especially the teacher. If you ask him a question he always answers in a condescending tone, like we should already know that. It shouldn’t be like that. I am seriously afraid of asking him questions! Questioning him though works sometimes I’ve noticed. I saw some errors in the data we got for this assignment, and he accepted my changes gladly. But the other parts are not okay for a professor. We did our best with the resources we got, and we actually sat down for many hours yesterday and discussed mitigation options. We thought about lane changes all throughout the intersections compared to other groups. Ugh! I just hate this right now. I hope we sent it in anyway and hopefully will get at least 90% on the assignment. Because everything before the last mitigation part is a very well done job!

Then the scuba class took four hours of my evening, I didn’t get home until 10:30pm, and after the shower and the Digital Cities quiz that is due tomorrow, it is now midnight and I haven’t even started on German. I will go through the review sheet one time tonight and that’s it. I am too tired for this. Let’s pray to something and hope it works out for me tomorrow! Wish me luck, I will need it.

One fun thing happened today (except me passing the final exam in the scuba class). On Tuesday I talked to my Digital Cities professor and asked about the grading on one of the short answer questions. Today I got an updated grade on PolyLearn. 100%! Go me!

 

The video is done, and I have to say that I am surprised at hearing my voice and accent. Neither was as bad as I thought. And the video is really good! Here is a link to it (3min), if you feel like watching it. Now, time to get back to studying… fml

Moviestar

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This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my two years in California. This full post can be found here.

Except for me pretending to be a moviestar all afternoon, nothing much happened. No class this morning which was nice, so I could sleep in until 10:30am. Land Use and Transportation Studies was okay, and then started the fun. In my German class I was filmed the whole time for the video project I am the star of. After that we kept going and staged my morning routine. That was real acting on my part, probably real bad acting, but I had to pretend to be tired. Then we filmed me driving off to school on my bike and that was it. Acting is hard, but I am sure you get more used to it the more you do it. I got nervous when I knew the camera was on me. But it was still very fun. Tomorrow we are going to the beach to get some footage of me playing beach volleyball and then walking on the beach and the sunset and all that comes with a beach. That will be fun.

This evening I have been relaxing in my room. I didn’t really want to start studying today, so I watched a couple of Arrow episodes and repainted my nails again. It already started to come off, and I got some new brushes today that I wanted to use. I ended up not using any of them, but next time. I would probably need more nailpolishes too, it is getting kinda boring with the same colors all the time. Not that there is anything wrong with turquoise, black, silver and white. But I need more.

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Aidan stopped by for a while and we talked about everything and anything again. I like our conversations. And I am gonna miss him a lot…

Now I will go to bed and continue to write on my short novel.

1st scuba lesson

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So tonight was the first scuba lesson and it started with a swim test. It was easy, 200 yards of swimming however I wanted and 10 minutes of treading water. I probably could have done twice as much, but I was a bit tired after TRX this morning. The workout wasn’t too bad, but then came the surprise of 3.5 minutes of Moby’s Bring Sally Up, and everytime they sang “up” or something we did one repetition. We could choose from either a row, or chest press. I choose row and that was hard. I was shaking and I am pretty sure I won’t be able to move tomorrow. That was intense. I am glad it wasn’t squats!

Anyway, the swim test wasn’t bad and the pool was heated so it was worse getting out of the pool. It has been very cold for a long time now. Then we watched movies on how to scuba dive, handed in homework (I wasn’t sure what we had to do so I just did it in class, but now I am aware for next week), and did two quizzes. It is a lot of information and I kinda feel lika I want more before actually doing this on Sunday. I am super excited but also a little scared. I’ve never done anything like it and I am afraid I will do something wrong. But I guess nothing can go too wrong in the gym’s pool.

The rest of the day was pretty normal, Land Use/Transportation lab, TRX, and German. Found out today there is another midterm on Thursday next week. What we are doing now is hard, but I will just have to study a lot for it this weekend when I have time. I kinda wanna sleep. And with my busy schedule for this next upcoming week, it feels like I should try to get as much sleep as I possibly can.

I just came up with the awesome idea of when I will do my first dive with my certification. In San Diego of course! There are guided tours in the kelp forest in La Jolla. That would be a nice first dive I would think. And only 35 feet so I don’t have to freak out about the depth. So excited!!

A+

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It is ”Friday”, 11pm, and I am ready to go to bed. I need to be better at using time during the week so I am not so tired all the time. Since I moved to SLO I haven’t been tired enough to fall asleep, but now I really have to try to stay awake by taking notes until my hand hurts from writing more than I need too.

Today we had a midterm review in Land Use and Transportation Studies (I can’t find a short for that course name) and it actually doesn’t feel like a completely lost cause. I just need to review it myself, write it down at least one time with my own words and then I should be good. I will do that tomorrow. We didn’t get our midterms back in Digital Cities like the professor said, but hopefully through PolyLearn tomorrow. In German we got the results on our midterm after class. We couldn’t get the actual tests back, so when class was done a bunch of us went up to the professor to give us our results. He saw me and just said that I got an A. I was surprised. I mean, it felt great writing the tests, but this week when we went over it, I got insecure in my answers, so I was actually a little bit surprised. When I was back at my seat to put my stuff in my backpack and the professor went through the pile of tests to find the other students’ results he looked at me and said: “Oh, add a plus to that letter!” What? I got an A+?! How does that even work? Shouldn’t A be the highest? I am super happy anyway, he must have seen that I tried a little bit extra on some problems, even if I probably missed a few minor adjective endings and stuff. I am curious to get that test back.

As soon as I got home I baked cookies, just normal cookies but with a click of Nutella in them. They flattened out so much in the oven so they are boring cookies with a little bit of Nutella. Still pretty good.

At 5pm I got picked up by Ralph and Cathy. Ralph is a 60+ guy in my German class, and him and his wife are going to Sweden for a week this summer and wanted some tips on what to do. I gave them a ton after eating a really good tacos dinner at Taco Temple in Morro Bay. It was a very nice dinner and they are really fun and interesting people. I wanna be like them when I grow up, adventurous, still traveling, finding new friends all over the world, just living to the fullest. If I am in Gothenburg when they are there we will probably meet up. I got really inspired by doing this research and I have already plans on being a tourist back home, I might as well do some stuff with them if they would be up to it. I got really excited about coming home and do all of these things. I also wanna go to Öland again. Maybe to camp this time? That will be a well-planned trip though and sometime in the future.

Old me am getting tired, so I think I will head to bed now, maybe watch another episode of iZombie and hopefully get a good night’s sleep so I have energy to deal with midterm studying and the awful homework we have in Land Use. I worked on it forever yesterday (we are analyzing 16 intersections downtown and are eventually gonna determine the future Level of Service for all of them). In the lab I discovered a lot of errors in the data material we got from the teacher so I had to go through it all and correct it and then send it to the teacher. In the afternoon I managed to get 14 out of the 16 correct for the current Level of Service. One of them, just doesn’t make any sense. I did everything correct, but I just don’t get the answer the teacher got. Probably because the data flows didn’t match the intersections directions… And the second intersection I don’t even know what is wrong with it… So annoying! My group is meeting up tomorrow afternoon again to hopefully fix that and work on the next step.

PCV Honor Banquet

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This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my two years in California. This full post can be found here.

Yesterday was a packed day again. First an hour of beach volleyball practice in the burning (but amazing) sun. Then an hour of extreme TRX. Well, technically it was only 25minutes of workout, but it was tough. Five different exercises and six different sets. First 30 reps, then 25, 20, 15, 10, and 5. I didn’t have time for the last five reps, which was running back and forth in the room five times. I was so dead after that. My whole body shaked really bad. I can’t really say that I feel worse today than after any other workout. Somehow I don’t get sore after pushing myself to the absolute limit. A little strange, but I am not complaining. Then I had almost an hour of waiting for my German class. We started watching a new movie, Herr Lehman. So far it is good.

As soon as I got back home I took an hour nap before heading to the main building in this village for some amazing (and free) cake from Madonna Inn. I also got a certificate saying that I got really good grades last quarter. This was the PCV Honor Banquet. Feels pretty good.

The rest of the evening I didn’t do much. I watched the new Game of Thrones episode, and then went to bed at 10pm. I couldn’t fall asleep though, so tonight I will take one of my pills so I will get a good night’s sleep.

I have kinda gotten sick again which really sucks a lot. It is not too bad yet, just a little bit of headache, a very heavy head, and a stuffed/runny nose. I hope it doesn’t get worse than this, being in the middle of midterm madness would not be any more fun with a bad sickness.

It is not too bad, because I did go to beach volleyball practice this afternoon. I actually felt better while doing it. After that I ran into David and a bunch of other Germans and hung out by the pool for a bit. But when it got hard to breathe again I went home for a shower, soup for dinner, a couple of TV shows, and now I am so ready for bed. It’s been a long day. Tuesdays and Thursdays are no fun.

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Aion account recovered

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My account was never gone. Apparently there are two different games for Aion North America and Europe. In Guild Wars 2 there are different servers for the regions, but in Aion two completely different installations. I tried to install the American version. Haha! Problem solved, I downloaded the European version and have now two Aion accounts, yay!

School today as usual. Last day of German before the midterm tomorrow. I am prepared and have done what I can. Maybe I could have done more, but I still feel like I have it under control. It is just a midterm. I went to TRX today as well, like every Monday and Wednesday. It was tough today. We did a tabata similar routine with six stations, both on and off the TRX. First 50 seconds on each station, one minute rest, then 40 seconds with one minute rest, and then 30 seconds and 20. It was tough!I survived, but I will most likely not be able to move my arms tomorrow…

I should go to bed now, read through my German notes, and hope for the best tomorrow afternoon!

Nail polish and school

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This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my two years in California. This full post can be found here.

This morning was so unnecessary. I usually have a two hour lecture in Digital Cities, but this morning we had a lab instead. We were gonna research a city given to us, groups of three. We pretty much did it individually and we are gonna hand it in individually. It felt like such a waste of time going to that class. I could have slept for two more hours…

At 11am I was interviewed by the College of Engineering which is writing an article about international engineering students. Then I spent 40 minutes in the library reading my book. And then my second class of the day, Land Use and Transportation Studies. I almost fell asleep. I need to go to bed earlier!

Last class, as always this quarter, German. The midterm is coming up very fast so I have been studying all night. Except when I procrastinated and painted my nails. This time I put a pattern on there, first time and I have to say that it looks pretty good. A very light purple grey color with a little silver in the corner.

I also finished the lab we started this morning and sent it in. Five days early. That has never happened before!

I’ve done my share of German today, so now I will go to bed and hopefully fall asleep right away. Goodnight!

CRP 338 lab 1 hand in IMG_20150422_003612The light isn’t the best, but you get the idea! And don’t mind the paint outside of the nails, that will be gone tomorrow.

German at University of Gothenburg?

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Last night I spontaneously applied to a fulltime German class at GU for the whole fall semester. I won’t have anything else to do, so why not? Now I just have to figure out how I will send in transcripts of my American grades for all the German classes I have taken/am currently taking. I don’t have any prerequisites from Sweden. I think it will work out, otherwise I have to come up with something else to do after the summer. More than just living with mom and read.

First week of this quarter is over now and I have had my classes. It will be a good quarter, very similar to the last one. I am taking one fun planning class Digital Cities, German 103 and then a transportation/land use planning class. I think the workload will be like the last one. A lot of stuff to do, but it shouldn’t be a problem. Ten more weeks and then I will have a Bachelor of Science in Building and Civil Engineering. Yay!