NCA

Last weekend I spent a few days at the National Communication Association Convention presenting my literature review, "The Influence of Sigma on Moral Dirty Workers and Female Sex Workers." I presented in the Applied Communication Division alongside four other professors. It was a blast of a weekend!

Additionally, a few days prior to NCA, I completed data collection for my masters thesis! This was such an exciting time and an incredibly successful weekend! There was so much emotion building up to this weekend and for it to go as smoothly as it did was an extreme relief. Now we are looking to finish the semester, code the collected data and prep for an upcoming semester in DC! There are many more things to look forward to.

Master's Thesis Update

It's been a week or two. Here's a little insight into what I've been thinking about lately:

We are less than 2 WEEKS from both data collection for my master’s thesis and NCA!!! This is nuts. These two very closely related projects have been a big part of my heart and soul for the past year and have taught me more than I ever thought possible. Throughout the semester I’ve been working really hard so that when this point came I’d feel incredibly qualified and prepared and it would all go just right, just perfectly. Unfortunately, I’ve been recently reminded that it’s not that simple (s/o to everyone who tried to warn me that this would be the case). Even if you send emails at just the right time and make phone calls with just the right balance of confidence and soft understanding in your voice, your iPhone might fail you and hide important voicemails for 5 days (how this happened I still don’t know), you might forget to check your spam email for a few days and when you do you learned you missed a deadline by a day (A SINGLE DAY! ugh), one of the most important people you plan to interview for data collection actually passes away 3 weeks before you go to meet them (what are the odds), or you just wake up many mornings very confused on who you are and what you want out of life anyway. This semester has taught me more about grit and perseverance than any experience of my life thus far. I’ve never been so giddy, so excited, so overwhelmed, and so dedicated to a project in my life. I’ve cried many tears of gratitude and frustration over the past few months and have sat in awe (many times) of how far this whole project has come. Ultimately, we are all far more capable than we think. For me, it feels good to be on the home stretch of these milestones and I am so thankful that this is what I get to work on. After this we just gotta write the rest of dang thesis but we’ll get there. One step at a time. Here we go, Friday!

Me and my binder on our way to Starbucks this morning.

Weekend Reflection

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/sugarland-taylor-swift-sing-babe-live-concert-733947/

This is me reliving Saturday night.

Best production I've ever been to. Hats off to you, Taylor Swift.