It’s that time of semester again.

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Well, it’s that time of year again: the end of semester, where all your professors think it’s a great idea to make all your reports due at the same time.

I’ll be tackling those reports for the next week…

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…in the hopes of not failing all my classes. Though it’s going to happen anyway. Australian universities are weird.

So if I’m MIA for the next week or two, you know where I am!

(Sorry about that! I have a lot I want to write about Australia, trust me. But grades come first!)

I am too busy

This is the state I’m in right now: (and in advance, I apologize for the crappier-than-usual-art, unwarranted complaining, utter scrubbiness and general messiness:)

I needed to vent some stress. It’s also my poor excuse for a viable blog post. It’s just that on some days, I barely have enough time to run to my dorm room to grab a snack between classes/working/volunteering, and that’s a little frustrating to me. It’s too easy to complain, though– what I really need to do is suck it up! And stick it out! It’s only a year. I’ll make it through, somehow…

Free time? What’s that?

Some things are eating my time. More like devouring. College kids don’t sleep? Yeah, it’s true. For me, this is for a couple of reasons:

1. My job.My job as an office assistant, more specifically. Though I only work twice between classes and once after class, it’s still, you know, a time commitment.

2. Volunteering. I’m part of the Civil Engagement Program (CEP)  a community service initiative that requires students receiving full-tuition scholarships to volunteer at least 100 hours a year. I have to partner up with a local organization and work there at least five hours a week– so I’ll be starting next week with Sociedad Latina. I’ll be designing and teaching a biology curriculum to underprivileged Hispanic girls.

3. School. Naturally. Studying and schoolwork takes priority, and time.

All of these together I could handle pretty reasonably, I think. But then one more– just one more opportunity came by that I couldn’t let slip away.

It began before the school year even started:

I applied for the job and included the link to my own blog. Though I was in the mindset of my sister, who said:

As it turns out, my blog is good for something after all! Just recently, the professor running the study at Northeastern sent me an e-mail:

It’s a long story, but I would basically create a daily comic strip about a character trying to lose weight using the study’s cell phone app. I’m not sure how much more I can reveal, since this is a study-in-progress. More importantly, the professor is conducting the study with researchers from Duke University. If they didn’t approve of his idea of incorporating comics, I would be out of business.

So I created some sample comics and sent them in. And waited nervously for two days…

But then, I got:

So I need to create a year’s worth of strips– 365 comics– ASAP. It’s more or less like creating a newspaper-style daily strip, four panels, black and white, for a year. This is a paying job, which is beyond me– getting paid for drawing? Impossible! So now, I’ve got:

It’s a lot. But I’m too stubborn to give up any of them. I want to do everything! It’s a problem. But I’m super-determined to do this. I can do it. It just means less free time and less shut-eye. I think it’s a fair trade.

And then I unexpectly became an office assistant

I have a job!

A completely unexpected job. I barely expected to get employed my first semester of freshman year. Inexperienced college freshman don’t get jobs. There are more qualified upperclassmen all around us, after all.

But I lucked out! On the day I moved in, I, by complete chance, met one of the heads of the NU Procurement Office in the dining hall. Later I saw her again at the student employment fair. Some paperwork, some phone calls, some e-mails, and bam: I have a job. A job that no less than 230 people applied for!

If you know me, or my friends, or my career-oriented family, then you know I’m often like this:

So this is quite a stroke of luck for me. Extremely so; I need the professional experience for when I search for future jobs.

Thus, the gaps in my schedule will be filled with filing papers, sending faxes, and answering phones! I apologize in advance if I can’t update this blog quite as often. My goal is, at the very least, once a week! But, naturally, school and work come first.