Unsurprisingly, the first half of this semester has flown by. Everyone told me it would start going by quicker and quicker, and they were right. That’s why I’m trying to do everything I can to live it up as my last year as a student at UT. That’s not to say that I haven’t been experiencing Austin for the past three years, however. I’ve seen a lot of the sights and been to most of the token sporting and musical events, and I have absolutely loved them all. That being said, this semester was a little different because I had to start doing some “senior things” such as finding internships and jobs, which have taken me some pretty incredible places. So for this assignment, I have mostly chosen the “choose your own adventure.” Most of these events relate to my being a student at UT, but didn’t take place at the University or in Austin. This first one did, however.
The Torchlight Pep Rally is now the equivalent of a “hex rally” that takes place on the steps of the Tower a few nights before the Texas/OU game. I hadn’t been since my freshman year, and when I stumbled upon it a few weeks ago, I decided to enjoy listening to Charlie Strong and some of the football captains, as well as watching the cheerleaders and pom squad dance. I had forgotten about the iconic Texas flag drop at the end, and in that moment, I was proud to be both a Longhorn and a Texan. Relating this to technology, I was so happy to be able to capture this moment, because it’s definitely not every day you get to see a massive Texas flag rolled down the side of such an iconic Tower! (also sorry this picture doesn’t want to rotate…)
A few weeks before this, I made a somewhat spontaneous decision to go see my best friend from high school, who I’m still very close with. She goes to Samford in Birmingham, Alabama, and I realized I hadn’t gone out there to see her yet. She came down to Austin earlier this year, and I got to show her around, which was really fun getting to show off my city. Of course I have pictures of that, but this is a picture of me “returning the favor” (happily), and letting her show me where she’d been living the past three years. In this case, I was happy to have a phone to document my trip and the time I got to spend with my best friend, as we are both in our final year at our respective colleges. So here’s a picture (that was obviously staged and filtered for my Instagram) of her at her favorite ice cream shop in the heart of Birmingham.
The most eventful week of my semester, however, was my trip to Barcelona, Spain. I mentioned earlier how senior year meant beginning to look for internships and possible jobs, and I think I hit the jackpot with this one. I’m currently working for a cloud software company called OpenStack, and I absolutely love it because I have so many incredible opportunities like this. Though I did miss a week of school, it was well worth it to get to experience what might be a potential job that lies in my future. Barcelona was wonderful, but since this is a class that deals with technology, I will definitely admit that it was difficult to get around at points, with a limited amount of data and practically no knowledge of the city. Thankfully, I knew enough Spanish to get myself from place to place via taxi, and I was able to avoid getting lost. I think the fact that I couldn’t rely so much on my phone forced me to actually use the knowledge I had, and made for a better experience overall because I was focused more on what was happening around me, and not on what was happening in the digital world of social media.
