Taking seven classes while playing field hockey and doing the job hunt thing was a little brutal this semester. Despite the courses, though, the rest of the semester was pretty fantastic. I arrived back to the east coast into Hartford, CT (from Vancouver/Seattle) and stayed with my friend Christian before heading up to Manchester, VT to visit my aunt and uncle's family's cabin. It is beautiful up there! I had a lot of fun in the quiet countryside. My aunt and I went on a really nice hike, went to a fun mountain and played some mini golf after doing the alpine slides, and then we ended the week with dinner and a show! We had dinner at a place that my grandmother frequented as a 20 year old. There was also a really nice bookstore and some good outlet shopping too. :)
After Manchester I headed back to Troy for preseason and the start of school. I have a lot of field hockey photos because, quite frankly, that was all I did until November haha (and study of course). I also got to travel out to Austin, TX and Seattle, WA (again) which was a lot of fun. I've included a bunch of photos to highlight my favorite experiences of the semester. I'm sure I will miss a ton of fun things but these are all I have photos of anyhow!
The farm in Manchester, VT
I don't have any photos of Jako on hand but I'm rooming with Jako in Bryckwyck this year. My car was having a lot of problems and Jako was always there to help and when I wasn't feeling well, Jako came home to look after me. :) Love my roomie!
I was really excited about this project this semester. I printed out some of Brendan's panoramas from England and cut them into posters and then framed them with a ton of smaller photos from my travels. I've also got a few other photos from high school on another wall along with some posters. The framed photo is a lovely gift from my hockey team in England! The decorations make studying a little less painful :)
This was also the semester that Kevin got a moped haha (left). What a cool kid. I mentioned we did a lot of studying... well now that we're seniors we can study in the student union pub! Although that only happened once haha. The bartender asked me if I knew what snakebite was. I spent a year with a uni hockey team in England, of course I do... : P
Seniors at Playday at Skidmore.
Senior Day against Rochester. One of my favorite defenders, Julia, is sporting the mask :)
Senior Day family photo!
Panorama of the team in the lockerroom. Julia photobombed it twice haha.
After we won against Rochester 2-1!
These guys are among my favorites at RPI! Max, Travis, and Alex hosted a steak and red wine party which was tons of fun. Not your average college party haha.
Arrived to some beautiful fall foliage back home for Thanksgiving (that's my trusty old Volvo that has made it so many miles! About 158,000 so far).
Thanksgiving dinner, yum.
I took Petey on a little bike trip to the Lincoln Memorial. I think she was pretty pumped haha.
I took a trip out to Austin, TX and absolutely loved it. If you ever have a chance to go you definitely should! 6th St was incredibly fun and Hop Doddy serves the most delicious burger on the face of the planet. I was visiting National Instruments and met a lot of really great people. Seems like a great company.
Actually I have a somewhat crazy story about my flight to Austin that I'm going to interrupt the pictures with. So I had a flight from Albany to Newark and then Newark to Austin on a Thursday but my first flight got delayed a bit. I was sitting on the tarmac waiting for some plane to back out of our gate for twenty minutes, staring at my watch wondering if I'd make my plane. I got off the plane, sprinted to the gate for my next flight, and then watched my plane take off. At this point I had pretty bad asthma and went over to the less-than-friendly customer service people who informed me that it was the last flight to Austin for the day so instead they put me on a flight to Houston (Texas is tiny, I could basically walk to Austin from Houston). So I caught that flight and arrived in Houston at midnight. I figured since my flight to Austin was at 7:30am, it'd be useless for me to bother getting a hotel so I slept as best I could on a very itchy carpet by the airport's tram tracks. I got about three hours of sleep which were intermittently interrupted by dreams of me missing my flight. I ended up arriving in Austin around 8:11am where I changed into my business clothes in the bathroom, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and got in a car with my awesome NI host (Dana) and went straight to my 5 interviews & technical presentation (which I had planned on working on in the hotel the night before haha jokes on me). For some reason I wasn't bothered by any of it the whole time. Perhaps my year abroad gave me great patience or I was just so excited to be in Austin that I didn't really care but either way my interviews went surprisingly well and I think everyone at the company was like, "How are you awake...?" I really did have a wonderful time there though and hope to make it back there sometime soon. I can assure you that my flight back to RPI was pleasantly mundane.
I got to catch up with some sailing camp buds in TX! Alex (left) was just visiting Kelly (right) who gave me a tour of the UT Austin campus :)
This photo is from the inside of a Boeing 747 mock-up (the "VIP" section). I had a lot of fun visiting Seattle and got to see a lot of cool things around the Boeing facilities. I hope to go to the Music Experience thing by the Space Needle the next time I go! To round out the semester, I accepted a job offer working with Boeing in LA.
Enjoy the following video of my teammate's pump up speech. Probably my favorite part of the pre-game ceremonies:
That's all for now! Thanks for reading :)
