life + relocating

i'm not relocating. i was just visiting the website of the art space i interned at last year. the woman who hired me is no longer working there. i checked to see maybe she had found another job somewhere else or is working full-time as an artist. i found her linkedin profile. she has moved to berlin to work on her artistic career. wow. i think it's so cool when someone does that. another friend moved from northern california to oklahoma for an internship and later, a job.

i know. i did this, too. it just feels so long ago. i can't do that at the moment. not enough money and too many obligations at home.

the cbox

a cbox is an instant messaging box that appears in your blog's sidebar. many years ago, when i had a modblog, i had one such thing. it was actually designed into modblog, though. for some reason there were always other bloggers stopping by and saying hello or commenting on something in the modblog community. the instant chat box served its purpose well.

this one is an independent box that has to be added to your blog. i want to add one but don't know if one will be used enough over here. sometimes reading other blogs, i know i just want to say hi or make a comment/have a question unrelated to any post, a cbox would be perfect for that. considering i don't have a link for others to forward comments to my email, a cbox might be good.

a similar platform is shoutmix. this one does not offer a free service. it has a nicer look, though.

cover letters and resumes

though i love the place i work at and the people, the hours are not enough. i've always been looking for a second job though not always actively going after it. a lot of the places i've applied to were retailers. not a place i want to go back to at all but i had no choice with my work experience.

only recently did it occur to me that i now have enough experience and something to offer to even write a cover letter. when you have very little work experience your cover letters just ends up repeating your resume which is not what you're supposed to do. that was a part of my problem in the past. so here i am. i just created a more professional email address and spent a few days trying to come up with a stand out cover letter. the cover letter itself i wrote in the body of the message.  i finally finished it. i test sent it to myself more than a few dozen times until hotmail told me i had reached my limit for emails sent in a day (never even knew there was a limit) but i fixed that by giving them my phone number which i never wanted to do (they promised not to give it away to third parties). copying and pasting from word document is a big disaster--everything becomes double spaced once it's sent! for my resume, i just sent it as an attachment.

so i just sent it in. in two weeks i will call the hiring person. also nerve wracking. then it's just waiting. hopefully something will open up in the future and i will come to mind.

i have a few more places i want to send it to, too. once all that's done, time to go back to studying for the graduate exam.

american studies

throughout my graduate school research of schools in europe, i came across an interesting program of study:  american studies. it's so odd, from an american perspective, to see it being offered. (in the u.s., a select number of schools also offer american studies which i was completely unaware of...)

today as i was looking into the university of utrecht i came across their american studies masters program. they have a school blog as well as a blog of one of the students. most of the students who contribute to the school's blog have had an internship in the u.s. in different sectors. it's interesting to see what career paths these students are pursuing as the first question that came to mind was what kind of career does one go into with a degree in american studies? for american students with a u.s. history degree it was always thought that there were only a few career paths: politics and academia. these european students, however, seem to have figured it out and are going into all these different areas that i would have never thought of.

reading the one blog that belongs to one of their most recent graduates, i learned what students of an american studies major call themselves (or at least this girl considers herself): an americanist.

career-update

i realized for my work in the nonprofit sector, my place is in admin.  I would like to work in HQ as opposed to working in the field (though i would like to be able to go out to the field, too). i came upon this conclusion based on my current job and from what i have envisioned for myself for the longest time. my current job is doing data entry. before i got this job i used to think data entry as a boring job. it might be if i only had to work with numbers. however, the data i work with is non-numeric. i can actually make sense of it, i know what it deals with, i can see how it helps the nonprofit. it is interesting to me. as far as what i envisioned, i always wanted to work and live abroad--in europe. so i put these two things together and that is where i'm at now. it does affect my school choices a bit. i will still have to study international development in some way but it might be as a concentration instead of the major. i might be going into nonprofit management (though i do not intend to manage a nonprofit - still working it out).

another thing i realized is that if i do my graduate work at a part-time schedule, it will take me 3-4 years to finish(!) the flip side is that it will give me more time to intern and i will have enough professional experience by the time i graduate to find a good job. not a bad trade-off.