Saturday, December 13, 2008

Leaving Madison


MADISON, WI -- Well, I am done with classes! No more lectures, discussions, or seminars ever again. All I have is two finals and then I am done, done, done. Crazy but time has flown by, 3 1/2 years and all. My two finals are Monday and Wednesday, and then I'm taking my first car-load of stuff down to Chicago.


The good news is that someone finally signed the lease, so I'm off the hook Jan 1-May 31. I still need to find someone who wants the apartment June 1-August 14, so if you know anybody who wants to live in Madison this summer do be in touch. Though hopefully the people moving in next week will simply want to stay around and take the rest of the lease. But 5 months are covered and I feel a lot better about that.


Not a whole lot going on right now. I'm cleaning up, sorting out a lot of trash, and taking some pictures before I start to pack a bag. I still need to do some studying, but I spent 4 hours in the library doing that yesterday and it's hard to focus that much on something still 2 more days out. I still need to go to the bookstore and sell back the books I don't want to keep, but I'll probably wait until after my final on Monday at least to do that, so I can take those books back too. The Bears already won Thursday night, so they aren't on tomorrow, and neither is Storm Chasers (my new favorite show on Discovery Channel). Like I said, things are kind of boring for the first time ever.


I am applying for grad schools, so that has kept me busy. But I'm actually done with all of the online information sections and essays - now I have to keep up on sending in my official transcripts as well as making sure my professors get their recommendation letters in on time. The good news is that one of them submitted everything to all 5 schools this morning, so I'm 1/2 or 1/3 for all 5 schools now. Just need to work on the other two...


The schools I'm applying to are: Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, Oxford, and London School of Economics. My goal frankly is to get accepted to any one of them. If I have any choice, I'll consider it extremely lucky. All of the programs are similar - public policy/public administration/international policy, some combination of the above. I also applied to Teach For America, 2 jobs at the UN, a handful at the State Department, the Foreign Officers Exam, the UN-Enrty Exam, the GRE twice, and some other jobs as well. So far out of the 40ish total applications I've sent out, I was turned down once by a high-level State Dept job, and have 3 in-person second-round interviews for 3 similar environmental advocacy jobs.


Anyway that's all for now. The travel plans are the same as before. Rio is looking like a go for March 11-22. For sure the 14-22, but I'm going to tack on a few days early to do some personal travel with family.


Will keep you posted! Any advice on Montreal would be great, the trip is coming up in only a few weeks! The picture is from Nitzana, Israel in August.

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