Everything is Winding down

As the semester is winding down, I seem to have "post midterm fatigue" where I really don't feel like doing any more work for a couple weeks. Unfortunately this is when professors are piling on the work to prepare for finals :(. All I want to do is watch Netflix and stay in bed. At first I felt really guilty that I was the only one feeling like this and that my class was going to leave me behind cause I wasn't doing any work. But then I realised that classes were getting emptier, classes were a whole lot quieter since people weren't answering questions anymore and extensions were being given for practically all homework and assignments. Honestly, I think finding all of this out was a really bad thing because it made me feel like since everyone else was feeling this PMF then it was ok for me to feel it too, which it wasn't. Now, trying to get out of it is causing me to be sleepy all day long since I can't sleep in till 12 anymore. 

My to-do list has gone from being empty to being full and looking rather difficult to finish in time. But I'll go down fighting!!

So what has happened between now and my last post?? Nick came to visit!! :D It was such a full weekend where no work was done. We went egg hunting with my cousin and her friend and walked across the Brooklyn bridge which was pretty.

The funny thing was that when we got across the bridge the eggs were all gone. (These are the Faberge eggs for the Big egg hunt across New York.) So we all got a train and went to Rockefeller Plaza to see them all on display which was cool. 

These were some of the eggs we found a couple weeks earlier. 

We then went sightseeing around Time Square on the Friday which was fun since I hadn't done a lot of sightseeing myself. The best part was that I was actually able to get us around the City without getting us lost and I knew which trains to get and stuff so I felt like a real New Yorker for a day.

So when Nick left it was time go get back to work. I an entire 2 days finishing homework which turned out to have an extension because no one else did it. I also have a couple papers due and finals to prepare for which I guess would be less right now if I actually did work the days coming up to Nick's arrival. On top of that I have to pack up my room to move out of my dorm. 

So what did I learn from my first semester at Pace?? Pace is really no different to UWI. The classes are more difficult and more is expected from you yes but the workload seems the same somewhat, the students are the same and will still complain about the professors. There's no real defining moment when you realise that you're now a graduate student instead of an undergrad. It's a gradual thing as the work piles on and the professors expect it all to be finished. Overall its been a great first semester and I know its only going to get harder from here so I want to be prepared.

Now I can't finish a blog without some sort of review. Well when Nick came we were supposed to go watch Captain America but it wasn't showing at the AMC in Time Square so we watched Divergent instead. Nick actually said it was better than expected which coming from him means it was great :) lol Since then I haven't watched many movies worth mentioning but I did manage to watch Vampire Academy a couple nights ago.

From the trailer and clips that I saw I already knew the direction of this movie was not the same as the book and I didn't have high hopes for it. The movie is good enough to take away boredom but its not one that you would watch over and over again. The book had a sense of endangerment and was so intense with the feeling like someone was after Lissa but the movie started to make light of it. It didn't have that feeling that they ran away for a reason. The script was sub par with the only character with the least bit of development for Rose. All the others just seemed bland which was not how the book had them. I think Lissa's brother had a little more character development than Lissa which is sad since he died in the beginning of the movie. All in all the movie had little depth and I would love for another director to pick it up for the sequel or even in a couple years to do it justice. There was no depth to it and it made it look like Rose and Lissa were just silly school girls. The casting for Mason seemed a little off as well and I would have LOVED it if Dimitri was the guy from the Covenant, Steven Strait.

Or just someone that seemed more relatable to Rose's character. Yea I know he's meant to be older but he seemed old enough to be her father which weirded me out a little. The one thing they got right was Rose's character which I was happy about but as someone who read and loved the books, they kind of destroyed the story.

As I said before, I have a lot of work to get to so hopefully there would be another post if I survive finals :)

Carla :P

Prepare for a rant.......

So once again I have been extremely busy with school and I haven't gotten a chance to do much other than school work. I can't believe the semester is almost finished already!! It's about that time when I have to start packing up to move out.

This whole moving thing is the main reason why I'm doing this post in the first place. Everyone knows that housing in NYC is difficult but housing at Pace just takes it to a whole other level. When applying for housing they say that certain buildings are for upper classmen only as if to say that only the older students can live in these buildings which is great. The reason is mainly because of the drinking age but you would think that housing would at least try to put the students in rooms based on their age or something! No, people are placed where ever there is a bed in a room that should really only have in one bed instead of 2. I understand that they're trying to maximize the amount of people the sleep in a building but there's a line to cramping people in a room. When the desk can't even fit in the room there is a problem. 

Problem number 2 with housing is that the graduate students are placed in rooms with undergraduate students. For a university that says so much about their graduate students being adults and independent and stuff, then why are they treated the same as the undergraduate students??? There needs to be a distinction between the undergraduate students and graduate students for housing. Like seriously, why would any adult want to live in such a small room with 3 other people who don't know the workload that being a graduate student entails??  This leads to problem number 3, why are there so few single rooms available?? If someone is willing to pay for a single room then why can't they get it or at least take a small double and ask them not to fill the bed at least?? Almost everyone I know who lives in the dorm now is looking for an apartment for the fall. Another issue is that even if you get summer housing here, you still have to move out during that 2 week period between the end of the semester and the beginning of the summer session. *Sigh* Where the hell are international students (such as myself) supposed to go?? 

For a university that caters to international students and adults from around the world, Pace needs to do a better job at satisfying it's students. All of this stress could make someone drop out or transfer to a different university. The classes are good but if you have no where to live how can you go to the classes?

On another note, NICK IS COMING TO VISIT!! I am sooooooo sooooooo excited :) Nick will be here next week for Easter weekend so he will watch me do work and then we'll go out to the movies or something when I'm finished :) I've had a little more time on my hands now that midterms are finished but I know it will be short lived so I've been trying to make the most of it. There was a guest speaker at school during the week so I got a little dressed up for it.

Then that same night Jessimae Peluso from Girl Code on MTV came to campus which was AWESOME and she was hilarious.

There were these other guys form MTV Ben and Josh that were there as well but everyone was talking so much I didn't get to hear them much :(

Today we walked down to the seaport since we finished class early and it was sooo warm out today. I got to wear my new leather jacket (I'll try to take a picture of it later)

Now I have somewhere to take Nick when he comes to visit. Oh I almost forgot......I WATCHED DIVERGENT!! :D :D 

I was soooo excited to go watch it and it definitely didn't let me down. It got the action and the relationship between and Tris and Four and it was just great. The casting for this movie was awesome. Everyone seemed to fit their character really well. They just announced that the third book is going to be made into 2 movies which was kind of expected since that's what everyone is doing now since Harry Potter did it first. Either way I'll be happy once they stick to the book and get all the important stuff in it. 

So that's all that is going on with me right now. I actually have a bunch of work to do for my courses but its Friday night and it'll still be there tomorrow :)