Tuesday/ Wednesday – Day 189/190
Posted on 10th February 2013
Approaching two hundred days… I’ve already been gone more than half a year now. I’m definitely missing home. Despite all the opportunity there are some things that can’t be found at Penn. To the people in Melbourne I love, don’t worry, I’m coming home eventually.
Tuesday was a bit of a nightmare. I accidentally pulled an all nighter, preparing work for the next day. As the hours grew later and later, my work remained unfinished and I just keep pushing myself harder and harder. Rehearsals meant I had only arrived back to my room at around midnight and was already tired.
Wednesday was my first ever OCR experience. ‘OCR’ for those of you not from the states, is ‘on campus recruiting’, a method by which pre-professional students, desperate to be noticed, flirt with companies of (sometimes ill) repute. A fancy way of me saying that it’s essentially on campus interviewing for the financial services industry. This means everyone dressed up in suits, desperately trying to stand out by blending in. My interview however was for a technical position at a firm that though financial had a number of good notes to their name. Again, if you want to hear more about it, send me a message. For the meantime, I’d rather keep my experiences interviewing with various companies off the public avenue. The interview went well and was mostly enjoyable. I struggled over a few questions but overall I felt I made the right impression. Following that I pretty much slept through my afternoon classes, being still short from the previous night.
That evening I stayed mostly clear of working too hard, as I was a little burnt out from the last few days. To that extent I decided I would go visit a certain friend in Rodin, who had a tendency to clean whenever I came over. I sent her a message asking if she was free and she said she was just on her way back and that she’d shortly send me a text. That done, I decided to work for a while in the Hillel and, after twenty minutes when it closed and I still received no text, I headed to Rodin. There I ran into another friend who I had reason to believe was avoiding me and so, to side-step any discomfort, I removed myself from where I was sitting and went downstairs to see if the pianos were free. Unfortunately they weren’t but I did run into one of the vocalists from Dischord (a college acapella group) who had greatly impressed me at one of their performances and let her know as much. So I sat down to work for a little until my power ran out. Still receiving no message, I decided to text the girl and find out what was going on, she as per usual, was awfully busy and hadn’t time for me yet. Thankfully though, at that moment the piano room was freed up and I had a little time to play before I received a message at 11:30 that my friend was finally free.
I went up to chat with her and she made me tea, before letting me know that she had something to tell me. She struggled a bit with it before it came out that she’d been seeing someone and was both nervous and excited for it. Just as she’d gotten that out of the way, there was a knock at the door and, who was it but the boy in question! She giggled madly, and I smiled politely, tea in hand as the boy at the door walked in a little bewildered and nonplussed. I stay round to befriend him for a while before heading back with a smile on my face, happy for them both.