Hey all!

Your last few days of school are probably rolling right up and you must be so excited!! Hope you're all having fun finishing up these last days of high school! It's so hard to believe that I was in your shoes just 2 years ago, and now I'll be going into my middler (third) year! Scary!

Well, between my last entry and today, I've been doing many different things while in Boston for the summer. One cool thing about Northeastern is that they put together a series of events for Summester. Basically, there are just a bunch of events and trips that students can pay for at a discount. For instance, last Friday, I paid $5 to go on a trip to NYC. My friend Anne-Marie and I just wandered around the area a lot:

Times Square -- Hershey Store (w/ M&M's Store right across!)

Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum (where we saw a few short Broadway performaces) -- A view from across the street. It was Fleet Week, so it meant that all the marines and navy people were around and we were able to check out the ships and submarines.

Museum of Modern Art -- Campbell's Soups

Another example would be that today, I went to Six Flags, and it was only for $10!

Above is Anne-Marie and me with a few of the Looney Tunes characters!

Then, within the next few weeks, I'll also be seeing the Blue Man Group perform, as well as go on my very first Boston Duck Tour! I'm definitely excited for these since I've always meant to do these things since I've started going to school in Boston. :D

Anyway, yesterday, I had my midterm for my Calc 2 class, which is just insane to believe that it was our 4th week of the semester! Only about 3 weeks left! Currently, I think I'm doing really well in the class, which is good. However, my professor just assigned us a project to do that must involve applications of calculus, which I'm a little iffy about. It's kind of a short project, but he said it has to be good. Talk about no pressure, huh? The good thing, though, is that it's not due until the end of the semester, so I *do* have some time to work on it. This is either 10 or 15% of my semester grade, so I'm really hoping to do well on this, as well as for the other parts of my grade too of course. :)

Recently, I've found out that my first day of work for my co-op job will be Wednesday, July 1st. My last day of work for The Conference Exchange is Friday, June 26th, so I'll only have 4 days off in between! I definitely don't mind though as I like to keep myself occupied. I'm most certainly looking forward to going on co-op, especially since it'll just be six months of working and *no* classes plus the fact that I do *NOT* have to pay for tuition. Phew! That is definitely a great advantage. I'm just really excited to be learning new things at a different place and different people. Now that I've already caught a long glimpse of one possibility of what I could do with my major, I think it's time to move onto something else. In a way, it's kind of like I actually get the chance to go on 4 co-ops, which is a cool thought. Hey, the more experience, the better, right?

As the day comes around for starting my new job, this also means the same for many of my friends. This time, a good number of them are actually doing something out of state -- the West coast, mostly. A few are going to Intuit in San Diego, CA and a few are going to Amazon in Seattle, WA. At the same time, for the most part, some of these people are ones that I have just gotten to know recently, so it'll be kind of sad to see them go. :( On the brighter side, there will still be some friends who are co-oping in the Boston area. In addition to that, those who went away for co-op this past Spring will be returning to Boston for classes, so in a way, I suppose this is a fair trade-off.

Anyhow, that's all I've got for now. I haven't gotten any questions in a while, so definitely hit me up with some! If not, I hope you have a blast finishing off the year! :)

Posted by Melissa Xie at 9:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hey everyone! Happy summer! Well, at least for Northeastern anyway.

By this time, you all should've made your decision as to where you'll be attending college in the fall. Wherever you may have chosen, I'm happy for you! It must be a really exciting feeling to know you're going to college, so you must also be really anxious to graduate! I know the feeling, trust me! :)

Also, at this time, I'm already back on campus and taking classes while I know some of my friends at other colleges are either still in finals week or just finishing up. Northeastern was done WEEKS ago, so when I went home for about a week, it wasn't all too exciting because everyone else was still in school! :( But now they're about done and I'm already gone!

Well, I had just finished my first week of Summer 1 classes, although I am only taking one class (Calc 2). However, after class, I work! At the moment, I am *still* working for The Conference Exchange. In fact, as of this past Thursday, it has been a year since I've started working for them! That's unbelievable!

Anyway, during the summer, most students take only two classes...they are either every day from Monday through Thursday for an hour and 40 minutes long or twice a week (MW or TTh) for 3 and a half hours each. For my class, it's every day at 8am, and honestly, I have not taken an 8am class since my Fall semester of freshman year for my College Writing class, so this is definitely a weird feeling! So far, it hasn't been too bad getting up for it, and hopefully, it'll stay that way! :)

For the summer, everyone is taking different classes and seems to be doing their own thing mostly, unlike how the Fall and Spring semesters are. There aren't very many Computer Science classes going on during the summer, so everyone's around to take a science, math, writing or some other kind of courses. However, regardless of the courses my friends and I taking for the summer, we still manage to find time to hang out with each other, which is great!

Since people only take two classes as opposed to the typical four during other semesters, there is a lot more time to do other things. For example, today, I went out to Harvard Square with a few friends for lunch. We ate at Mr. Bartley's, which has some amazing burgers, but I had never gone there before, so it was an interesting experience! I ordered "The Mitt Romney" which was a burger with Swiss cheese and onions and it came with a HUGE pile of onion rings...totally super! I used up sooo many napkins! After we ate, we just kind of walked and hung around the area, enjoying the nice weather -- quite relaxing, I'd have to admit. Then, at some point, we decided to catch a movie, so we saw "State of Play". Interesting fact: we actually bumped into one of our professors and his wife a few times today in Harvard Square, which was pretty cool and interesting to see professors outside of campus. Apparently, he lives nearby!

Well, I hope you all are having a good time finishing up school...most of you should at least have until the end of the month right? It's something like that for one of my sisters who's currently a senior in high school. Her graduation's around mid-June (how scary that she's graduating!).

Once I get my camera back, I'll definitely try to post up some more pictures of things going on since I haven't done that in a while. Until then, have fun!

Posted by Melissa Xie at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)