A hectic week and three unproductive days.

Of course, folks. I'm back. After sitting around for three days contemplating what I'm going to write to land this IBM internship, I finally came up with something around 8pm. Yeah, that's after three days of contemplating and two rough drafts of what I may be able to turn into a personal statement a few months from now when I'm playing the venture capital game to pay for school.

Now, as I said before I haven't been doing anything for this whole weekend except sitting on my ass and pondering how I can do great stuff. Yeah, folks, that's a complete oxymoron. Doing great stuff involves getting off your ass. Those who shook the world up didn't do it by sitting on their asses. They got off their own asses, plus made others get off their asses, too. The only thing I'm doing is slightly falling behind. I've got this programming assignment due Wednesday (technically tomorrow) that I've made absolutely no real progress on. That's pretty disappointing.

In any case, I figure this week will go well as long as I fulfill some obligations that I have to some groups that I've joined such as NSBE and ACM. I know I have an executive board meeting on Thursday and office hours at 10am. I hate office hours. But, this time I'm going to really try to make some use of them. I remember a quote from a book I read about Stanford GSB. A lady told the entering class of I believe 1989 or so that they should not even waste ten minutes. I can have a full belief in that. Believing in something and actually doing it are two desperate things.

But, okay. This week was really something interesting. It was career week here at gracious old Howard University and we had over 150 companies come a-courting. Who am I now probably dating? IBM, Goldman Sachs, and various government agencies. I just re-emailed my personal statement and resume back to the recruiter from IBM, so hopefully he has something nice for me to pour over tomorrow. I'm really suddenly interested in IBM. I'd feel really great working with them. Hopefully, if I do work for them, I'll be able to work in Raleigh. They do have a corporate campus about 1.5 hours from my house. It's great.

Now, Goldman Sachs, on the other hand, that's a different kind of bread, butter, and cheesemelt. I've been following them since my junior year in high school. I know a lot about them, and I'd be willing to spend a summer with them, too. They were the folks I originally was scoping out for an internship, but I wanted to see what IBM was about. I mean, hey, my first laptop was an IBM. Plus, they really seem cool anyway. I'm hoping somehow, I can get into their Extreme Blue program. That's a really serious internship. If I can't do that this year, I would really start working toward that for next year.

I mean, lately, I've really become committed to having computer science really be my major. I've been reading a lot lately and doing a lot toward getting internships and building my resume. Plus, I've been doing things here and there to build up other folks in the school of engineering. The other night I was helping a friend do a program. It was fun when we finally finished. The whole process of programming and software engineering, to generalize it, is really fun and the discovery aspect of it is really great.

And then tonight, while putting up posters in the engineering building, something really interesting happened. While running from that prune, Eddie, I ran into this other guy that I really had a rather interesting conversation with. He's a chemical engineering student that goes by the name Seyi. Seyi really had been scoping me out (not in a romantic kind of way), but just had seen me around the building a lot. He noted that I seem to be always be studying and working. I thought it was a novel observation, and I really wondered what it could mean. Do I really work too hard (while not really accomplishing much)? Or do I just appear to be in a frenetic state of constant motion? I can't tell. Another thing I couldn't tell was who I was.

Seyi asked me the thing I dreaded in the Park Scholarship interview with NCSU. "Who is Tiffani?" And it's almost a shame that, maybe, two years after being asked that question, I still can't answer it. At least I didn't tell him I was "laid-back" like I told the scholarship committee. And truly, I couldn't answer it again. I just told him some stuff about community service and I guess that was alright.

He seemed to think in about five years I could be doing really big things. I hope this isn't another person that I let down. Hm.