Good morning, Internets. You may have forgotten that there are other authors for this SHC blog besides Meg (who I should add has done a fantastic job holding down the fort through the entire semester). It was an extremely busy semester for all of us here at Penn State, but we’ve made it to Winter Break.
What was going on with me, you ask? Academics went…uh, well (::sheepish grin::). As a student with a ton of AP credit, you have a number of options for what you can do with the time you gain from not needing to take some introductory or general-education classes. Many of my friends have picked up a second (or third) major, a minor (or two or more), taken graduate-level classes, or spent a semester studying abroad. I decided to take a slightly less academic path and instead threw myself headlong into the major national news story of the past year, the presidential election. You may have heard that I am involved in Represent Penn State, the non-partisan student voter registration organization. This year, our organization decided to form a coalition of other student organizations to effectively reach the entire student body with both voter registration information and Election Day information. The coalition, called the PSUVote.org Coalition, went into classrooms, ran tables, and visited organization meetings to get students to participate. I served as the chair of the coalition, which meant I got to work with a number of motivated students from other student groups as well as participate in a number of discussions and conference calls with state and national-level organizations working to make sure that students were successfully registering. The work was long and difficult at times, but I think it taught me a number of useful real-world skills, including how to work with a range of people, including those you may disagree with at times.
So, given all of that, I chose to have a somewhat reduced academic course load for the fall semester so that I could devote the proper amount of time to politics. I did do well in the courses I took, and a couple of them turned about to be enjoyable, like cartography. (Yes, cartography.)
I also began the grad school application process. I am applying to five schools for city and regional planning (or the equivalent): Penn, MIT, Temple, Rutgers, and Maryland. The applications are just about finished, so stay tuned for the results later in the semester.
Speaking of applications – the reason we’re here is to discuss undergrad admissions. I hope some of you reading came to the Fall Honors Preview Day in October; I would have been there, except that day was also the last day for voter registrations to be filed, so I was running around campus (and up to Bellefonte) all day. My sister is a senior in high school right now, so I have a good idea what other high school seniors are feeling. Hopefully, everyone submitted their SHC applications on time and are finishing up the rest of their applications. Good luck to all of you!
That’s enough for now. Remember, if you ever have any questions about the SHC, feel free to leave a comment. Look for more posts from students in the SHC in the spring semester; we’ve got plenty of events to blog about. Thanks for reading!
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