My Last Fall Semester Wrap-Up

Last Fall Semester

Once again I have failed my readers. If the month and a half since I have posted my last blog post doesn't give you any signals, my semester was CRAZY! I do not feel like I have ever been busier in my life. I did not expect my last year of college to be so jam-packed with homework, events, and surprises thrown at me but it certainly has taken me for a ride. This semester was challenging to say the least and I will probably miss out on a lot of details while writing because I was a goof and didn't do more frequent updates but I will definitely try to hit the high points. 

Most of you who have been keeping up with my time at Ouachita know that Homecoming Week and Tiger Tunes is the busiest time of the year. It's full of pep rallies, Tiger Tunes shows, and other events on top of regular classes and assignments and what not. Usually though, my life slows down after Tunes and Homecoming. Not the case this year. In fact, I was absolutely swamped with things to do until about two weeks ago. To add onto the stress of Homecoming week, the president of our chapter of SAI resigned and I was elected to be the new president. It wouldn't have been as stressful if we hadn't done fall initiation, but we did. Despite the stress of being elected into such a high position in my club, I'm excited to lead the group next semester to end out my time at Ouachita with a bang. 

Overall I enjoyed my classes a lot this semester. I especially enjoyed my Creative Writing class, enough so that I am taking Advanced Creative Writing next semester! Most of my classes were challenging this semester, especially Cognition and American National Government. With a lot of hard work though I managed to get all A's this semester. I even made a 100 on my Cognition paper, which apparently does not happen often for this professor at all. I always get nervous when I'm struggling in classes, but I've come to terms with the fact that even if I am having hard time with the class, I am still learning a lot of information. Not every class needs to be a piece of cake. 

This semester we initiated five new members into SAI, which is huge for us! Our chapter has really been dwindling with large numbers of members graduating each semester, but we are working hard to build our numbers up again. We've got some great girls who are going to do awesome things for our club! 

This semester's Wind Ensemble group was wonderful! We played the best lineup of songs (in my opinion) that we have played since I have been at Ouachita. There wasn't a single song that I disliked and each year I have grown to love the people in my section more and more and we have such a great time together. We had our second annual Trumpetsgiving celebration, which is the Thanksgiving celebration for my group of friends from the trumpet section. We played Secret Santa and had great food, while also sharing lots of laughs. Playing in the Marching Band this semester was a little bittersweet. I've always enjoyed marching more than concert band and so turning my uniform in for this last time was pretty tough for me. 

So many other things happened throughout the semester that I'm just not remembering right now, but to celebrate the end of the semester, my wonderful roommate, AA, and I went to the debutante ball in Hot Springs for the 3rd year in a row, so we could have an excuse to dress up all fancy and dance. Then I stayed with her until Wednesday because her birthday was on Tuesday and we had a big family dinner at her house. 

Like I've said a couple of times already, this semester was super trying and challenging for me. I had to rely heavily on my planner (as usual) and really consider what to prioritize in my life. I honestly can't believe that next semester is my last one at Ouachita and with my grades from this semester, I believe that I will be graduating Magna Cum Laude. I think I'm going to have some interesting classes including Abnormal Psychology and Advanced Creative Writing and I'm looking forward to ending it all with a bang. 

Also, sometime after the break I will be submitting my application for the Admissions Office so y'all say a prayer for me! 

I promise that I will post more over the break, probably about Christmas and share with you the family pictures we took with my mom's side last week! I hope you all have a wonderful holiday and get lots of rest before school starts back! Enjoy these pictures from my semester as well! 

Geezer's Night Out

Initiation Ceremony

Trumpet Section

Battle of the Ravine

Seniors in Marching Band

Pledging Ceremony

Nerd Prom

Tiger Tunes 2017

Wind Ensemble Concert

Cousins at Battle of the Ravine

My Mommy and Me

My Halloween Outfit Challenge

Spooky Season Outfits!

Well, it's been a month since I've written a blog post and in my last one I wrote about my spooky season outfits. I know I said I would write a post at the end of each week but I just decided that I would post them all in one. My life has definitely NOT slowed down since Tiger Tunes has ended, that is for sure. However the semester is coming close to an end and I am looking forward to Christmas Break for sure! I will try and write an update post this weekend, because there is definitely a lot to update on, but I just don't have all of my thoughts collected right at this moment so I will try to work on that. So for now, enjoy some pictures of fun, Halloween-inspired outfits!

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4 

Day 5 

Day 6

New Industrial Piercing!

Day 8

Day 9

Day 10 

Day 11

Day 12

Day 13

Day 14

Day 15

Day 16

Day 17: Halloween!

Last Minute Pirate Costume!

Day 7 (I'm not sure why this picture went down here but oh well!)

Now it's time to start planning for next Halloween I guess :) ~Em

The Busiest Time of the Year!

Everything is Happening!

If you didn't know, this week is Homecoming week here at Ouachita, which also means it's Tiger Tunes week. For almost everyone on campus, this is the busiest week all year. On top of our classes, there are so many various activities on campus that keep us constantly going, especially if you're involved in the band, a social club, Campus Ministries, or Student Life. For those of you who don't know what Tiger Tunes is, it's a show put on by the Ouachita Student Foundation to raise money for student scholarships. The different clubs and groups on campus pick a theme for their show, some of this year's include Pirates, Ghosts, Barbershop, and Genies, and they mashup songs to fit their theme. It's a whole lot of fun and it's a time when a lot of different groups come together for a great cause. Since I'm in the band, I just participate in the Tiger Blast show every year, where we take our marching show and bring it indoors! This week is incredibly demanding for the marching band because not only do we have Tunes performances Tuesday-Saturday (with two Tunes shows on Saturday), we also have to perform at a pep rally on Friday and during the half-time show at the Homecoming football game on Saturday. It's exhausting and after this week I will likely just sleep all day Sunday, but it is a great experience that I'm glad I get to be a part of. 

This week has also been trying because the president of our chapter in SAI unexpectedly decided to resign from her position. We're in the middle of initiating a new pledge class so this news was pretty shocking to us and made us unsure of what to do next. We will be electing a new president on Sunday, so hopefully we will get everything back in order soon. Thankfully, our sisters from the Henderson chapter across the street are going to help us out, because they have gone through some things like this before and sort of know what to do. 

With all the craziness happening this week, I am for sure looking forward to fall break at the end of next week. It will be much needed for sure. I think that's all I really have to cover for now, except a blog challenge announcement! I am going to be doing a spooky/fall/Halloween outfit challenge during this month! At the end of each week I will share all of my outfits that I have worn throughout the week. Stay tuned for the last 10 days or so leading up to Halloween because that's when the outfits are going to get really amazing! 

~Em

Update on School!

Y'all! School Has Been Hectic!

Considering it has been almost a month and a half since school has started, I think I have had sufficient enough time to decide how I feel about my classes and whatnot. Also, I just haven't had time to blog because of how busy this semester has been! 

I have been enjoying my classes, for sure. Several of them are pretty reading heavy, so it is getting tough to keep up with all of my assigned readings. The classes I am enjoying the most have to be Social Psychology and Introduction to Creative Writing. Social Psych is the perfect bridge between my two fields of sociology and psychology, so it keeps me interested for sure. As for Intro to Creative Writing, I have been pushed out my comfort zone, which is reading books, into actually doing the writing part of that. We just finished our prose section and I had a ton of fun with writing a fiction alternate dimension story. 

We're starting to get into the time of year where we are taking our first tests of the semester, which is always nerve-wracking. We had our first exam in Cognition last week and I actually did really well on it! I'm not saying I would normally do bad on exams, this course just requires you to remember a lot of specific details about the brain and its functioning. 

In other news, tonight is the Pledge Ceremony for this class of recruits for SAI and I could not be more excited because we are adding FIVE new members to our club! I may have mentioned this before, but our club's size has been going down recently. After those that graduated last year were gone, our club was down to 8 members, and then one went inactive for this semester, so we currently only have 7. So, needless to say, we are in significant need of these new MITs! I think this is the first time in a couple of years that we have rushed in both the Fall and the Spring, and it is proving to be very beneficial to our club! Also, with this new class of members, I finally get a Little! I am so excited to be a Big and can't wait to see what these new girlies do for our club! 

I have also been trying to actually hang out with my friends, because I am SO stinking bad at saying "Hey, we should hang out soon!" and then never actually making plans. So I actually have been doing stuff! I've gone adventuring and played pool with friends and know that more fun times will come! 

I don't have very many pictures from this year so far, but I will share with you guys some pictures from TWIRP and whatever other things I've managed to capture so far! Thanks for reading guys! ~Em

Geezer's Night Out!

Nerd Prom With Tina and Louise

Uhhhhhhh

First Day of Class!