Hello!

I know it’s been ages since I last posted, sorry to the 2 people who randomly ended up here due to a Google images search for Haribos! Maybe one day I’ll have a bit of an international following and you guys will chuckle at the thought of someone finding this blog purely because of a picture of food… (not just any food though! I think Haribos are a perfectly valid reason to land here, and maybe you’ll even find something else that interests you).

Anyway, it’s August, which means it is close to September and therefore very close to the start of the new university year, and Freshers Week.
I may have mentioned somewhere that I do fencing, and this year I am the fencing club secretary, which means I actually get to be involved in planning for the arrival of all the new students, as well as helping my friend the social convenor plan the first event – exciting stuff! 🙂

Also, my ‘little’ brother is going to be starting at Strathclyde this year! (Sorry to go all nostalgic on you, but that makes me feel old. Even though he’s actually already slightly older than I was when when I started uni, it just seems so weird and kind of ‘wrong’ that he’s going to university and all grown up etc.! But I digress). I am quite pleased that he’s coming here, not necessarily because I’d see him more often – it’s a big campus and a lot harder to randomly bump into people who don’t study the same thing as you than you might think – but because we have made a deal that he’ll come visit me occasionally and cook, if I provide the food and do the dishes. This may sound like I am drawing the short straw, but he is an amazing cook so, despite my dislike of washing up, I am perfectly ok with this!

This summer I did nothing except fencing and enjoying the glorious summer weather we had here for the first half (foreign students always laugh at how happy we are with what they consider minimal amounts of sunshine, and how everyone uses any vaguely nice day as an excuse for a BBQ), and then managed to get an internship in marketing and communications through the university, which lasts for 1 year, so I am committed until the end of next July. Oh.. But it’s been good so far and it will be brilliant experience, and it saves me having to find (and try to get) a totally unrelated part time job during term time. (I want to earn money to save for a ticket to Australasia and meet/visit my family there next year, as well as getting my own fencing kit at some stage.)

As always, I want to be more organised and a better student this year (especially for finance – it’s very important this time because I need decent marks to be able to do joint honours, and I am just fed up with not understanding it!), write more on here, and also learn things like how to properly use Adobe InDesign and Illustrator (I only know the very basics) and, now that I did a course about it for work, maybe website design a little bit. Other goals include coming across as/being more assertive and improving my fencing, which ties in with the assertiveness really, but obviously also includes actual skills and fitness. I will go into more detail about this at some point, but I think I mainly need to make swimming more of a weekly thing, and apparently it would help if I learned to run properly (ugh..we’ll see. But I do want to get better, and succeed at competitions.) Then I have ‘Strathguides’, a project I got involved in last year which will be going into its second year of giving guidance to students in SIMD areas (see here for more info) who want to apply to university, which I want to be more involved in.

I want to stay in touch with people better/more, manage my time more efficiently and effectively, sleep enough, eat well etc., and most importantly I want to be ‘braver’, something I’ve been ‘working on’ for a long time. It’s sort of an ongoing project.

This is starting to sound like some very delayed New Year’s resolutions, sorry, but I’m hoping having this on the world wide web for everyone to see will occasionally remind me, and generally hold me more accountable to, my goals and plans, and then I can come back and see what I’ve achieved. Also, I think a lot of people blog for this reason, so I figured why not join the club.

I have grand plans to post more useful information about studying here, and structure everything in a more organised way, and generally make it look prettier eventually so please come back regularly or sign up to keep up to date with the latest!