Welcome Back - Spring 2013

Hey guys. It's been a little while but I do have some updates I want to pass along. First, I'm all moved in back on campus! Classes started on Wednesday so I began moving my stuff on Monday. One of my roommates moved back already so me and another guy took advantage of that so it wouldn't be such a mess on the actual move-in date on Tuesday. I'm finally out of dorm housing and am now in an apartment which is still school owned. It's a two bedroom, four person flat with a massive living/dining room but a tiny kitchen; it gets the job done though. The guys I'm living with are really awesome. I've known all of them since at least Sophomore year if not longer, and yes, I'm out to all of them: two of them since freshman year, and they're cool with it all and really supportive.

I'm taking five classes this semester: Advanced International Business, Business Law, Management Science and Decision Making, Buyer Behavior, and for kicks Sounds of Language which is a linguistics class. I only have classes Mon-Thur which is sweet but I did have to take an 8AM class to get it which is kind of a pain. So far, my classes already seem much more difficult than Denmark which is expected, but getting back into the groove of things is still going to be a challenge. Advanced IB is also the last class in order to complete my International Business major so that will probably be a lot of work. The other classes are basically working towards my Marketing major (it's official, I got my faculty advisor signatures and did all the paperwork) and the Linguistics class is basically going to a liberal arts credit. The linguistics class is actually a class I thought would be pretty simple but now I'm kind of scared because I will have to learn and be able to reproduce the International Phonetic Alphabet which entails learning this which is more than a little intimidating. If anyone out there has taken a linguistics course or is a linguistics major/nerd do you have any tips?  Other than that, I'm expecting this semester to be pretty challenging so I gotta be sure to balance work/play.

Other than school stuff, I'm looking for summer internships. Most companies who are posting summer internships are mostly large investment banking and consulting firms like Barclays, Goldman, Credit Suisse which don't really fit into my major. I'm just looking and hoping something shows up. It's nerve racking since almost everyone else in the business school (aka Finance majors) is constantly going to networking events and scrambling to get in their applications for the summer while I'm kinda stuck until more marketing type internships open up. I talked to one of the marketing professors who pointed me in the directions of a few government agencies which I think I'm going to look into like the Department of Commerce which could be a good bet. One thing that does annoy me about my school is that while it does attract some very well known and powerful recruiters, it's such a finance-centric atmosphere that it leaves many others who aren't in the field or major a bit out of the loop. Nevertheless, the two professors I talked to said later in the semester there will be more opportunities for networking events with more marketing type firms which I'll attend. I'll also have to go to some on-campus interviewing workshop for later in the semester when even more recruiters start coming on campus.

Yesterday was the Spring activities fair where basically all the clubs and organizations come out and table for all the students to come see what they're all about. First I helped with the the grilling club which is doing well; in the semester me one of my roommates who is also in the club were gone, the number of new members - freshmen and sophomores, went up at least 50% which is pretty awesome. They all seem really nice and kinda shy at first (perks of being senior to them haha) but they open up quickly. There's a pair of them at the post-grill party who were hella good at beer pong though. They were on a 8 game winning streak when I left last night which probably is a new record. Me and my roommate E were ahead until the last cup when they narrowed it down to 1-to-1 and bounce shotted it in. Overall though, the weather was beautiful and the grill was sucessful. I also did some tabling for the LGBT club on campus. It went well but I don't feel as particularly close to them as I used to, I guess mostly because many of the members don't really have enough in common with me for something like that. Most of the guys in the club are, and I don't mean this in a derogatory way, really, really gay. Like, you can tell after two seconds gay. Everyone should be happy with who they are and whatever they do, but for me, it makes being able to identify with the rest of the LGBT population for difficult. I'll probably go into depth about this more in the future post since I've been thinking about this for a while now.

Alright, well that's what's been going on in the past few days in a nutshell. Hopefully I will find time to write in the future once classes really start getting underway. I'm planning to start a series of posts regarding stereotypes in the LGBT community and specifically its impact in a college atmosphere so hopefully you guys will find that interesting. I did a similar post a few years ago which you can read here but I plan on expanding and going into more depth in this series.

Cheers everyone; I hope everyone is doing well.

All the best,

JP