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København – When the World Opens

When the world opens, I wish I had known how hard it is to breathe when the landscape takes your breath away. When the world opens, I wish I had understood what it means to be happy even when living in a foreign place and being pressured by things back home. When the...

Adventures Ahead

As the semester comes to a close, I’m looking forward to the summer. As of late, my excitement for the future is seemingly the only thing pulling me through the hustle and bustle of the end of the year. This summer, I’ll be taking a few trips which I’m very excited...

Measuring the Quality of the College Experience

Will I consider college the best four years of my life? I saw a TikTok the other day where a woman spoke about how it’s okay if college was/is not the best four years of your life. The comment section was flooded with other users thanking her for reassuring them...

A State College Summer

As the semester comes to an end (thank god), I am becoming more and more excited about spending my summer in State College. When I first became a student here at Penn State, I could not, for the life of me, fathom why anyone would want to spend a summer here when they...

Fighting to fight, or arguing to persuade?

In ENGL 202H, we have been learning about persuasion all semester, whether it be persuasion in the context of a personal statement, academic papers (e.g., your honors thesis or journal publications), or even an op-ed. Persuasion is something that we’ve all...

It takes a village.

As I reflect on my time in the PLA, at Penn State, and up until this point in my life, I find myself returning to the well-known proverb: “It takes a village to raise a child”. I was anticipating writing my final blog post (and of course getting emotional...

Second Year Showcase

I am writing this in the state I have been in for the past two weeks, anxious for my second-year showcase. This is the half recital that vocal performance majors must complete near the end of their second year as their final entrance to the performance major...

Weekly Report

This week, I’m going to use a blog format I really enjoyed from someone else in PLA. It’s called Weekly Report, where I’ll share what I read, ate, played, obsessed over, recommended, and treated myself to throughout the week. It’s a fun way of summarizing...

New Positions for a New Year

With much inspiration coming from Olivia’s post, I am eager to announce that I have been selected as the Director of Internal Affairs (DIA) of Lion Ambassadors for the 2024-2025 school year. This is a position that I have had my sights set on since I joined the...

Grateful

For my last post this year, I just wanted to reflect on this whole year and all the opportunities that I have gotten. I think that often we are caught up in getting ahead of where we are now that we don’t look back to see how far that we have come along. I am...

Thank You PLA

I wanted to dedicate this last blog post to the wonderful people and experience this organization has exposed me to. PLA was without the doubt the best organization I’ve been a part of while at Penn State. It has given me a lot of exposure, whether that is...

Henna!

As we approach finals week, the pressure of grades has been relentless, occupying my thoughts constantly. Atherton’s Renovated Downtown Lobby has become my prime study spot. Here, I spend late nights pouring over my work, particularly focusing on my organic...

Local Outreach and the Nittany Lion

Recently, I’ve become more involved in volunteering to talk about caving with boy scout troops in the area as part of the local caving community.  It always feels nice to be able to get outside of the “student bubble” to interact with the larger...

“Once you know better, you can do better”

This week, the quote of the week has returned! It has been a while since I’ve heard something profound that moved me to write a blog post about it, but I couldn’t pass it up this week. This past week yielded a lot of profound and moving quotes, but the one that stood...

Faculty Interview for my Thesis

As the thesis proposal process continues and my class begins the process of idea generation, I wanted to reflect on a faculty interview I conducted to learn more about my potential topic of quantitative finance. I wanted to talk to a professor who had a quantitative...

Another DC Summer :)

I recently accepted my offer to return to the NHLBI for this summer and I could not be more excited to be back at NIH. Last summer, working in the academic medicine environment really gave me a sense of where I want to work in the future; there is such wide-ranging...

My Last PLA Blog

As this semester (and my undergraduate career) comes to an end, I have had some time to reflect on all the things that I have learned, memories I have made, and the people that I have met. I have been very happy with how my college experience has turned out, and most...

Just See You Later

The problem with having everything to say is that you end up with nothing to say. If all of it matters, none of it is critical enough to be decisive.    I had a good two weeks. My friends and I busted our asses (am I allowed to say that? It’s the last blog,...

Finally Talking Materials Science

This is so sad to realize but this is my last PLA blog post. As a result, I was looking back on all of my posts and noticed that none of them are really about Materials Science. I have been studying this field for the past 4 years, about to have a degree in it, yet...

Prioritizing Me

Something that I learned this semester was prioritizing me. I think this was a very hard lesson that I had to learn, especially this semester. With all of my commitments this semester, I found it very hard maintaining everything in all. As usual, I thought that I was...

End of Semester R.E.P.O.R.T

I have seen some of these R.E.P.O.R.T’s in other blogs and thought it would be fun to try it out for the last blog of the semester. Reading: I haven’t been doing too much reading recently- the most recent books that come to mind are The First Law Trilogy...

Bon Appétit

This past week, my assignment for Honor 301 was to share a personal growth goal and establish a tangible plan to achieve it. While brainstorming my response, I was immediately brought back to my first blog of this semester, where I shared some of my goals for the new...

Slow Down

I often find myself caught up in the rush of things. What’s funny is I find that most people also feel this way, at least those I’m in the same organizations as. You get your different subcategories of organizations and the stigma surrounding these groups....

Time

I often go back to one of the things that I heard most from adults throughout my childhood, which was the idea that time starts to go faster as you get older. I never believed this of course, but as I am soon approaching my 20s, I can now confirm just how true that...