This weekend was action-packed, both for me and for GSE. I had a chance to participate in my first huge GSE Open House event, which ended up being huge and crazy and wonderful. We had about 130 prospective students check out the programs they were interested at GSE. Everyone got a chance to talk to each of our program managers, mingle with some current students, and eating delicious sandwiches. If you were there, you may have met me at the registration table, kind of giddy, because I get a weird sense of satisfaction signing people in and out of things. I discovered this as an undergrad at Penn, when I volunteered to help during move-out at the end of the year and had an unnaturally good time asking people to sign things out. Everyone's got their thing, and if this Linguistics PhD thing doesn't work out, I'll seriously consider working at a front desk or the DMV when I grow up. But back to the Open House. We had representatives from all 8 divisions who held sessions describing the goals and requirements of each program and answered tons of great questions, from courses, to housing, to great places to eat around campus. I got especially excited whenever I saw a new Educational Linguistics prospie enter the building, because just like in my cohort, they all have ridiculously impressive histories and life stories. I remember at my new student orientation, when people started explaining all the different languages they spoke and all the different countries they taught in, I was very intimidated, cuz I was just finishing up my senior year and knew maybe 2.7 languages, if you were generous. But I've learned a lot from them about navigating foreign conversational environments and making people feel comfortable, no matter what their linguistic background. So I was excited for the prospective students to get at least a glimmer of that environment.

The second part of my day was equally hectic and great. I ran out of the open house a bit early since I was hired as the lighting operator for a dance production on campus and the matinee show started at 2pm. During my four years of undergrad, I was involved with a salsa dance troupe on campus called Onda Latina. I choreographed a piece for their show almost every semester and starting my sophomore year, programmed their lights and sound and managed all the production elements. Lighting design became a huge passion of mine and I started getting gigs from other dance and singing groups around Penn. I'm so happy I got a chance to continue doing lighting design as a grad student. Luckily, most of the performance troupes on campus also accept grad students, which provides a nice escape from all the academic hustle during the year. So for all incoming Masters and PhD, I recommend checking those out, especially if you were passionate about performing arts in college.