Catching Up on Things

FINALLY AN UPDATE FOR THINGS!!!!!!!!

Since April, I've been quite busy with college - final exam, scholarship applications, Year in Japan applications, and senior design projects. I finished everything in mid May, now I am relaxing and enjoying my summer vacation. Over the past couple of months, I really understood a few things - such as hard work will ALWAYS be rewarded and don't ever work with "jags" on projects. Hmmm...what do I really mean by that? well, you will soon find out...haha

For senior design, we were given the tasks of designing an optimized chemical plant for the production of Maleic Anhydride or Quinone. The choice is based on the research of price and world demand of each production. Also things we need to taken into consideration are optimization/design strategies, material of construction, and economics (yea...it really was a lot of work). We have a 4 member design team, in actuality, it was more or less a 2.5 person team (3 person on a good day). We worked on our design close 4-7 hrs a day for the past 4 weeks. I was very glad that we were able to finish everything (2:00pm monday) before the final due date (5:00pm on monday). Our report was longer than anything I've EVER WRITTEN....153 pgs....
But due to our efforts, we got the 2nd highest grade in the class...congrats to everyone on the One World Chemical design team (Buy More Chemical is such a lameass name...)

Luckly, this semester I only have 1 final exam as opposed to the usual - 4 finals. The Japanese final went very well...at least I thought so when I walked out of my exam. Man, there were some amazing people in my class. Somebody (Choo-san) actually finished that exam in ~35 min... no seriously...35 min...WTF, that exam was designed to be probably around 1.5 hrs. She's too smart haha... But I checked my grade afterwards...got a 97/100. Who thought that I'm actually good at something other than math and science? Soon after I finished my Japanese final, my roommates and I went out to celebrate. Our celebration consisted of drinking (none of us got wasted), eating, gaming, and karaoke. KARAOKE, I always wanted to try it. It's actually FUN, but PAINFULLY expensive - $35/hr (what the hell!! $35/hr = my high school tennis lesson fees). My roommates and I had an awesome time there - it would be even better if Mike had agreed to sing/rap P.I.M.P by 50 cent. Well the song selection is basically Japanese or English. Majority of the songs I sang was in Japanese...yea, I do listen to chinese songs...but I don't have a voice of a girl so I gave up on chinese songs before we even started. While singing, Mike went into an "Arashi"mode...he picked out all the songs sang by Arashi and told me to sing it...I almost lost my voice that night....but it was awesome. Within the next couple of days, I turned in my passport for Year in Japan.

Speaking of Year in Japan...OH GOD, I CANNOT WAIT FOR THIS...I am looking forward to this amazing opportunity. I never thought about going abroad to study since I am so busy with Engineering stuff, research, and internships. This will be amazing!! Even though it is a language intensive training program, I get the feeling that I will enjoy it - to the fullest. Recently I just received my airline information - I will be leaving August 31st and returning sometime in May 2010 (probably after Kaori's Wedding). I guess this blog will be my Japan updates/diary - I will try to keep it update daily or weekly.

Enough ranting about Japan, continuing with my other rants...After the final exams have finished, I decided to lose some weight by running...and...I'm out of shape...which is REALLY BAD. I hope to get back in shape this summer though. Anyways, I left the campus on May 17th - the day of graduation. Congradulations to all my friends that are graduating this year! I will be right behind you guys...in 2010... After the whole "Nan not graduating this year" thing, something funny happened... I actually got a "congradulations on graduating Chemical Engineering" letter in my mail. Well, that was for certain A SURPRISE. More or less, I was freaked out about this mail. So I called LAS and my department. It turned out that my department did not update the graduation list (I sure hope so...More panicing will come if I discover my dipolma in the mail at the end of July).

Since I'm home now, nothing interesting had happened. I can't really do retarded stuff, that'll just drive my parents into thinking "the child I nutured for 22 years is a retard". So the recent news is...GRADES...YAY...boring... I did well this semester and I might actually have a shot at making the dean's list (I pray...I pray...). Aside from that, I've picked up my racquets again...AND I've been running 2-3 miles everyother day. Hopefully I will lose some weight by the end of summer ^_^.