Since the weather is starting to turn cold and everyone is trying to hold onto those last couple of days without our big, puffy winter jackets I decided to remind everyone where the weather is always warm and throw a “Night in the Tropics”. I went and bought a whole bunch of decorations from Party City, things like leis, flip flop table centers and blow up clown fish. There was a pretty nice turnout and we all ate Hawaiian pizza while watching “Cool Runnings”, the movie about the Jamaican bobsled team.

Yesterday I took the day off from my internship to get some life errands done. I can’t believe it’s almost Thanksgiving and I’ve got a ton of little things that I need to get done before I can start thinking about heading home! I’m so excited, I haven’t been home in almost two months so I’m going to really enjoy the couple of days to lounge around and have some good food with my family. One of the main things that I have to knock out before I can think about home is a small research paper due on Monday for my Legal Issues in Human Services class. It’s only five pages but for some reason I have found the hardest time motivating myself to sit down and actually write it. Maybe I’ll go try and chip away at it now…

On Tuesday night I had another concert, but this time I was doing the performing.  We had our departmental Voice Recital in Baird Recital Hall.  It’s always nice to get a chance to perform, and is very refreshing at this point in the semester because it is something to work for that isn’t a paper or a final exam.  I was also excited because my mom was able to come up for the concert and I am always enjoy when my parents visit.  The next couple of days are going to be super busy trying to get things finished before I head home for thanksgiving on Tuesday, but I am really excited about the way this semester has been going and am looking forward to the next couple of weeks!

Straight, No Chaser is an all-male acapella group that made a stop at UB’s Center for the Arts this past weekend. The show was awesome! I was all sorts of proud because a bunch of my friends, The Buffalo Chips (UB’s male acapella group) had the awesome opportunity to open the show. They did an amazing job, especially considering this year they welcomed five new guys to the group! Then Straight, No Chaser came on and were really entertaining and incredibly talented.

It was a sad end to the night to come home and watch the Patriots lose to the Colts by 1 point in the last couple of minutes to the game though. Gotta’ love football season!

I am a Resident Advisor on UB South Campus and I am thankful and proud that to be a part of a great team which makes living on South Campus even more exciting. As a tradition, all the RA staffs on South Campus come together a week before Thanksgiving and we have a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner. For those of us who don’t get to enjoy home cooked food that often, it is a great time. Our professional staff (supervisors like Area Director, Hall Directors, Asst. Hall Directors etc) cook dinner for the RAs. It is a wonderful time and we get to meet our supervisors’  families and sit down and enjoy a meal together. We had our South Campus Thanksgiving dinner yesterday night and we devoured the ham, the turkey, three kinds of mashed potatoes, apple pie, cheesecake etc etc! And this week the dining halls at UB will also have thanksgiving food, so that’s another reason to build my appetite! I can’t wait for more pie!

Events like these bring us together as a staff. It makes us realize that we are all in this together and that we can depend on each other. Our staff is like any other family – we live together, we eat together, we fight and we make up! So one thing I am thankful for this Thanksgiving is my RA staff. You guys ROCK and I love you!! GO QUAD!

So apart from the plethora of exams and homework, the other thing that has been keeping me busy is the GMAT. I finally have some sense of what I want to do with my life and I decided before I lose that small ray of light, I should lock it in by taking the GMAT and applying to grad school. I took my GMATs this morning and I think I did pretty well on it. Well, I surpassed the average score required by the grad programs I am considering. So I am very satisfied with my performance. I really do wish I had more time to study for the test though. I think I would have done much better if I had taken the exam in summer. That is one thing to remember – when you are planning to apply to a grad or undergrad program, make sure you have a schedule and that you follow it. You should take the standardized test and submit your application way before the due date. Waiting till the last minute – not a good idea.

Well, I am off to the library to do some studying. I know, I know it’s a Saturday but hey, thats senior year for you!

After a lot of conversations with my Assistant Complex Director in the apartments about what I potentially want to do with my career, he asked me to attend a conference he was running over at Buffalo State College for Student Affairs professionals. It was a great opportunity because that conference is generally held for graduate students or professionals in the Student Affairs division of Higher Education. So I took a half of a day at work on Friday and went. The presenterswere very well respected people in their careers and had some really interesting and informative things to say. What was really awesome was the people that I got to meet. Because my boss was the one running it, he introduced me to a lot of great professionals in the Student Affairs area and I was able to have a lot of great conversations. It was an awesome way to make connections but also a really good chance to talk to people who are involved and working in the field that I may one day want to take a chance at.

Another really cool thing I did this week was on Friday night after the conference I hopped in the car with a couple of my friends and headed into a local suburb around here to try our hands at a deaf bar! The Buffalo Club for the Deaf gives deaf people in the area a place to get together to meet and hang out. We went to go push our sign language skills, to meet new people and let me tell you it was a really cool experience! The people that we met were some of the nicest and friendliest people I had ever met. I really surprised myself with how well I did communicating with only a couple of months of the class under my belt. I can’t wait to try it out again!

The main concept of the concert was to inovoke the atmosphere of the “Wednesday Musicales” that Nadia Boulanger used to host in her Paris apartment.  It was a formal concert, but I appreciated that the musicians took the time to speak to the audience and give a brief history or anecdote about the music in between pieces.  I did not know that the famous composer, Aaron Copland, was the first Americans to study with Boulanger, but furthermore I had no idea he had any connection to Buffalo!  He was a guest lecturer at Buffalo’s June in Buffalo Summer Music Festival, as well as working with the BPO and influencing and teaching Lukas Foss. 

This concert is an example of one of the reasons I love my major…I am required to attend concerts! I do have to write a paper about this concert.  It was very inspiring (it even got me to pull out my recording of Copland’s Tenderland already) and I am now very excited to be able to learn more about the music as well as express my own thoughts and opions about it!  I will definately be keeping an eye out for future performances of these musicians!!

Aside from that tour plug, things on campus have been extremely busy. Yesterday and today is the vice presidential elections for the Student Association (our student government). The elections are extremely heated and you can barely walk through the student union without being bombarded by fliers. Its kind of exciting to see how excited and involved students are in the student government.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, but with the holidays comes all of the rest of the work and exams that I need to get done before going home for break. Its terrifying to think that once Thanksgiving comes, there are only two more weeks left in the Fall Semester.