Week 4.5

I've been really busy these past few days. Yalu finally arrived last Friday and moved in. It took a couple of days and few trips to various hardware stores to make the house livable. I think we're all pretty settled in now. We had fun this past weekend going to Coney Island, buying lobster and crab in Chinatown, going to watch UP, going to Central Park, etc. Pictures of these things are coming. Yalu will probably put them up on her blog. Anyway, the weekend was still pretty chill despite all this.

This week at work has been extremely busy though. I left work the past two days at around 7:30pm. Actually, I don't think I've left work before 6pm since the first or second week. But the next few days will be pretty busy too since we have to finish up the submission for a project. I don't mind staying late to finish stuff. But it gets really tiring and most people leave by 6 or 6:30pm, so it gets lonely in the office.

There was an intern presentation today. We all talked about what we've been up to for the past month or so. It seems like all the managers are keeping their interns busy. But no one seems to be doing anything particularly interesting or innovative. Everyone's just doing little bits and pieces. It'll probably be a lot different when we make our final presentations at the end. But it seems like most of the other interns are focusing on one or two projects or working on the same stuff (e.g. CAD) for different projects. I, on the other hand, feel like I have this huge backlog of stuff I have to do. I think I need to spend some time clearing this queue before I take on urgent projects like the one I'm working on now. I think my coworkers are really starting to want my help on projects now, which is good. I feel like they're all waiting for me to finish with these drawings I have to do so that they can hand me more stuff.

This summer is so different from last summer. Last summer I left work at around 5:30pm everyday. It was a much smaller group too. This summer I'm so much more busy. I haven't left work before 6pm since week 1 or 2. I've worked on 6 different projects already vs working mainly on one project last summer. I feel like I'm learning a lot. But as a friend of mine pointed out, I really need to start quantifying things that I've learned. Think about the skills that I can put on my resume. And get a better feel for the discipline, learn the trade. I'm not at the point where I can hold intelligent conversations about geo-stuff yet. But hopefully by the end of the summer, I'll have a better feel for what's out there. Maybe even contribute something to brainstorming sessions.