Lessons From a Fourth Year

December 14, 2015December 15, 2015Leave a comment

Wake up Early… EVERYDAY

Stop complaining that there are not enough hours in the day when you are sleeping through the two or three most important! I have learned that knocking out the hardest tasks of the day before noon makes for a much better day.

Take B12

This stuff is literally a miracle. A B12 and a cup of coffee will make even the busiest day seem conquerable.

Save Naps for Rainy Sundays

I cannot say that I believe those Buzzfeed posts about nappers being more successful. Successful people know what they need to do and they get it done, without sleeping in between.

Only Wing it if You’re Good at It

Vague, I know, but winging-it is a true art. There are people who can get away with a client pitch with no research, but most of us are not Don Draper so I have learned that it’s better to be overprepared than sorry.

Download a text editor

I use Grammarly. It makes emails to professors and research papers a lot less of a threat.

Stop Giving People Your High School Email Account

Sorry naticus93, you are now demoted to retail store notifications.

Networking is not Just for Seniors

Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT wait until senior year to start networking. Build strong, professional relationships, go to events, reach out and ask questions – it will make job searching a lot less stressful when you finally roll around to it.

Ignore FOMO

On any given night you will have around 6,000 options to participate in, and sometimes you’re not going to do a single one of them, or sometimes you simply can’t. It is okay. There will always be more, and you will have a lot more misery thinking about the things you didn’t go to than the actual missing out on them.

Competition should inspire you, not threaten you

Why do we get so upset when other people find success? There is room for all of us to be successful, and frankly, I would rather have friends in high places down the road.

It is okay to not know exactly what it is that you love yet

It took me three majors and a lot of soul searching – to still not even know what my calling is yet. But I am closer and I have tried out a lot of things and I have gotten pretty good at some of them, so I’m learning to enjoy the ride.

Actually do things that scare you

Whether that is applying to an internship that is coveted or going on a study abroad all alone in a place you know nothing about – you will almost never regret it.

Make Decisions for YOU

I spent far too much time making my life decisions for other people, and for a while that meant living a life that was not my own. Sure you need to reach out for advice and wisdom, but make decisions for you. As I have reminded my Gamma Chi girls upwards of one million times, “YOU have to live the life that you make, not the people you are letting make it for you.”

Suspended in a Sunbeam

September 15, 2015September 15, 2015Leave a comment

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” -Carl Sagan

Feeling small is an incredible blessing.

Recently I had the overwhelming joy of experiencing this on one of the largest scales imaginable with a short trip to the Grand Canyon. It was on this too-short voyage that I was humbled in a way that I don’t think I have ever experienced before.

So much of our society is pounding us relentlessly to be obscenely large in our self obsession, to occupy time and space in the biggest ways imaginable. That identity is found in grandeur of oneself.

But standing in the Grand Canyon, looking over the entirety of earth’s history, you learn just the opposite. Identity is found when you feel incredibly small. Identity is found in the humility that we are just an infinitely minute part of the universe. Identify is found when you put it all in perspective.

This is not to be mistaken for insignificance. Just the opposite. This identity is found when you recognize that you were created as part of the infinitely long, magically complex human story for a very specific reason.

Like strokes in a Monet. We are not meant to be large, we are not meant to be enough all on our own. We are meant to be intertwined, blended, saturated, and morphed. We are not meant to be seen as a stroke, we are meant to be viewed as a work of art. We are meant to be seen from a step back, meant to be seen from a place of perspective. The beauty of our kind is we we have a boundlessly talented artist putting each of us exactly where we are supposed to be. An artist whose masterpiece can only work when all of us realize our destiny.

A destiny to be small, yes, but more than that a destiny to be part of a masterpiece.

Delta Gamma Senior Photo Shoot

August 26, 2015Leave a comment

In May 2015 I got the opportunity to shoot the senior photo’s for the UGA chapter of Delta Gamma.

Sitting on the Fence

August 26, 2015Leave a comment

“He has sat on the fence so long that iron has entered his soul”

Remember that time when you couldn’t really wear clothes from the children’s department anymore, but the junior’s department was still a little too mature? The time when you floated around in this gray, gap tween purgatory, lacking a grander identity.

That’s where I am at right now, only instead of not being able to find an outfit for the middle school dance, I can’t find the next move I am supposed to make in this journey we call young adulthood.

I realized the reason I am unable to move forward is because I am quite literally sitting on the fence in almost everything that I do. I have got one foot at my childhood home in North Carolina, and one in my new home in Athens. I have one foot in law school applications and one filling out applications for a career in PR. I have one foot telling me to grow up and take on the responsibility and one telling me to stay a kid as long as I can. I am perched so high upon the fence, that my humpty dumpty moment is approaching inevitably.

I am sitting on the fence, because I thought from up here I could get a good look at my different landscapes, and hopefully be able to make the right decision. That’s not how it works though. When you perch yourself up on a fence, you get just a distant, skewed perspective on what is around you. To get a real view, you have got to dive right in and take everything in from experience.

That is what I have got to do. Just pick a side. Dive in. Experience. Learn. Grow. Learn some more.

Honestly, anything has got to be better than sitting in the middle. So that is my vow, stop teetering on the fence of indecisiveness and lunge off onto a side. What’s the worst that can happen? So I don’t like a side, I can just climb back over and try out something else.

Unlocking Keywords Campaign

August 26, 2015August 26, 2015Leave a comment

As part of my internship with HW Creative Marketing, I was able to head up a marketing campaign for an ebook that I wrote on mastering keywords for small businesses. As part of the campaign, I wrote several blog posts to bring attention back to our premium content offer. This was not only a phenomenal experience to strengthen my writing skills, but also to become more knowledgable on a subject that is becoming vital in the digital era. Here are a few examples of some content that I authored for the campaign.

Child’s Pose

June 16, 20151 Comment

Lately I have been thinking a lot about how my newly entered “adult” life never seems to let up, just throwing one challenge after another – leaving me anxious and on edge. So last week I tried to find a few moments in my relentless schedule to take a chance to do some yoga. I went through the series of Bikram poses growing tired and sore from the exercise that I had strayed one for too long, and was relieved when I eventually settled into child’s pose.

As a sat there lying on the ground with my arms outstretched and my body sinking into the floor I thought about how satisfying sitting there in that moment was. Sitting there in child’s pose is where I came to the realization that that very moment represented the approach I needed to be taking in my hectic life. Child’s pose is not particularly special on its own, if you were to rest in the pose right now there would be nothing stand out or spectacularly relaxing about the moment. But after a rigorous hour of challenging poses and pushing your limits, Child’s pose offers a moment of refuge and peace that awards you for the hour of hard work.

That is life I realized. Finding complete and utter peace in the smallest moments, knowing that those moments are only satisfying because of all the hard work that lead up to them. Life is no longer about waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel, its about enjoying the tiny beacons of light along the way and knowing that you are chugging always forward to the next destination. A cup of coffee on the walk to class. Lunch with a friend you haven’t talked to in a while. A manicure. These are the child’s poses that I have been overlooking lately. The precious moments of reprieve amidst the insanity of this crazy, wonderful, scary, life. These moments may be fleeting, but remember that they are only powerful because of all of the hard work that preceded them.

In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

Khalil Gibran