Accomplishments

After taking my last midterm on Friday and sitting through my last lecture at Brown this afternoon, I'm feeling a bit nostalgic.  Where did the last four years go?  Actually, where did the last twenty-one go??  

Rather than dwell on the inevitable entry into the real world (or the "realer" world, since I'll put off true adulthood for another two years during grad school), I figured I'd look back on some of the non-resume-worthy things I've accomplished over the last four years.  

• Tennis.  I officially won a game!  True, I won because the other girl kept double faulting on her serves, but still, she ought to learn how to serve better.  I count it as an official win. 
• Running.  My longest run was an estimated six miles--a full hour long journey from Providence to Pawtucket and back.  I only matched that once in high school, and that was motivated by a former drill sergeant soccer coach.
• The anti-freshman 15.  Possibly as a result of all those miles I've run, I will be walking out of the Van Wickle Gates smaller than when I walked in.  And I plan on wearing heels for graduation, so I will also be a little taller. :)
• Balloons.  How many does it take to fill an entire dorm room floor to ceiling? 970.  We were still finding balloons under the bed for a week after my freshman roommate's birthday, and I had to move out the night before the surprise to avoid suffocating from the latex smell. 
• Friends.  I have 483 on Facebook, which back in the day when I was a prefrosh, was only open to college students.  Do I even know 483 people?  That's twice the size of my high school graduating class, and I can guarantee that I didn't know half of those people, even though I went to school with some of them since preschool. 
• Anti-coffee addiction.  Everyone said I would go off to college and start drinking coffee, but it hasn't happened yet!  Somehow I made it through four years without much/any caffeine at all--thanks in large part to my fondness for power naps.
• PowerPoint.  I can put together an eighty-minute PowerPoint presentation in about three minutes if I need to, which did happen occasionally when I was a teaching assistant.  The secret:  ask questions, but do not answer them on the slides.  Use pictures to symbolically demonstrate your arguments.  The mystery makes people have to pay attention.
• Stata.  Ask me what "outreg price income education ageold ageyoung, se rdec(3) bdec(3) ctitle (II) append" means.  Or "twoway(scatter) energy year if state==43."  Both will give you pretty charts.  This is probably the most useless thing I have learned at Brown. 
• News.  I stay very up-to-date on the news, probably because reading online newspapers and magazines is much more interesting than reading about the effects of the 1970 Clean Air Act on infant mortality.  My daily briefings might rival those of Obama:  the New York Times, Huffington Post, Slate, Brown Daily Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, and when really looking for distraction, Time, Newsweek, and Cosmo.  Oops, did I really just admit that I read Cosmo? Ummm moving on...
• Language.  I can speak snippets of French (bonjour!), Setswana (dumela!), and Swahili (jambo!).  Thanks to the GRE, I can also speak English like a pedant.  And thanks to texting, I can also talk 2 ppl w/o rly knowing how 2 spell neway.  lol. 
  

So there you have it, my top ten accomplishments that have so far gone unrecognized.  Nice to know that Mom and Dad's $180K has paid off over four years, right?  So here I go, onto whatever comes next, who knows what, but I'd say I'm pretty well prepared.  

srsly tho, gtg, only 3 more wks 2 add 2 this list.  ttyl y'all  ;)