It’s been such a long week! I’ve been trying my best to make food and not eat out, but it’s been hard. I’ve also been spending way too much money on coffee. In other news, the weather finally started cooling down and feeling like autumn on Thursday, though it’s due to warm up again on Wednesday, but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts! I’ve started wearing my Lorenzo Magni Christmas sweater in the early mornings and late nights at my apartment (I haven’t yet worn it out because I’m afraid of getting attacked by Halloweenies and Thanksgivers). Also I realised that the colour of my “Christmas green” (labeled as such on the tag by the thrift store) Timberland sweater I bought for $5 at a thrift store at the beginning of summer is very similar to the colour of the bleu paon Hermès Halzan bag my mom gifted me this summer!

I’ve been seeing my friends a lot more this year and have been visiting the city with them more often. I think we’re all feeling like there’s a lot to see and do before we graduate and leave for different places. But these outings haven’t felt like sad “lasts.” I’ve been happy and I’ve been working hard. Though I definitely need to get a move-on on the job front.

I’ve been a busy bee bzbz. Full of little moments, nothing super exciting to say overall, but I’ve been happy. My days are mostly going to classes, doing schoolwork, and finding moments in between to hang out with friends. I’ve been spending more time at UPenn lately because my new transportation card allows me to ride the train into the city for free on weekends! When I find that I’m not being very productive working by myself, I’ll pop on over, super cas[ual].

I feel like I’m always doing work right up until class starts and I feel like a terrible student for it, especially so early in the school year! I think it’s because the assignments for the majority of my classes can never really be “finished”–the assignments for my digital design class at UPenn are all about the process, so I’m constantly thinking about it, always trying to either complete an idea or come up with a new one, and for my two senior seminars (for my double major), well, I won’t be done with that until I turn in my senior thesis at the end of the semester! I’ve also been spending a ton of time on Her Campus; I’m going to have to be better about delegating responsibilities, especially as the year progresses and my work increases. Unfortunately, I haven’t had very much time to be creative on my own (photoshoots and blogging). But I have been feeling motivated academically. It feels like I’m always working and I kind of like it, but it doesn’t feel like I’m getting enough done, which I guess goes back to the never-being-finished thing.

Though I started going to classes last week, this was my first full week of classes. As it’s the beginning of the school year, there’s lots of new and exciting and good things, as you can see from the length of this weekly update! I’ve been spending a lot of time doing work in my sketchbook and on Illustrator for my Art, Design, and Digital Culture course at UPenn. Honestly, if that was my only responsibility, I would be totally fine spending the majority of my days working on it. Most of the rest of my time has been spent launching Her Campus at my campus and establishing its structure. This is a lot of fun for me too, but again, I spend more time on it than I should! On the other hand, what I don’t spend enough time on is thinking about my senior thesis. The linguistics department really gets on us about our timeline, so my linguistics senior seminar is actually the “course” I’m most stressed out about. It’s only the first week and I already feel behind on my thesis?? The computer science department is a lot more lax, so I’m not as stressed about the computer science senior seminar. And the only other course I’m taking that I haven’t talked about yet is Speech Synthesis. It’s only the first week, so we’ve just been going over introductory linguistics, which I’m familiar with, and we haven’t gotten any homework yet!

Whilst writing up my junior year in review blog post, which I’ll be publishing next week, I browsed the archives of my blog and realised that I don’t give very many real-time updates. For example, my ten days in Europe in July were stretched out on the blog throughout August, and all other content got held off; I even posted more than two times a week in hopes of getting the Europe posts out in a timely manner. So starting September, I want to bring back weekly updates. I’m not sure if I’ll be taking you day by day or if I’m only going to share the highlights or if I’m only going to share about the one thing that’s been on my mind that week; we’ll see what I log naturally. I’m not sure how this will affect my month-in-review blog posts, but these month-in-review posts tend to get a little lengthy anyway, so it might be a good thing to splice things up. Also, this gives me an excuse to relax with live updates on Snapchat stories and Instagram stories and live in the moment.