The semester has gone well. All classes are fun, I really like my instructors. Classes though are hard. I’m taking Air Traffic Control, Flight Physiology, Aerodynamics, Commercial Ground school, and Turbine Engines. These are a lot more challenging especially Aerodynamics.

The newspaper was off to a great start as we just had production this past weekend and the outcome looked really nice. We are getting better and better every issue. Newspaper conference is coming up and we are selecting the lucky few that will get to go with us. It will be a great learning experience and maybe we’ll win an award this year for our continued improvement.

I’m finishing Precision approaches and soon will be getting into cross-country flying. Little nerve racking as soon I’ll be up for my checkride. Alright, time to go finish studying, talk to you all later.

Final are finally over and now I’m a home back in Denver. I have only two days left before I have to go back to school. Sucks becasue I don’t want to work at all but I’m ready to see my friends from school again. Even though break is practically over, I did a lot of fun stuff. Some of these were going snowboarding 4 times, my birthday, see old friends (one I haven’t seen in six years), and getting to know more people all while relaxing and having a good time.

It is Wednesday before Thanksgiving and my family has been preparing for one of the biggest meals of the year. This is one meal I am definitely going to gain a couple of pounds. I don’t know if it’s just me but I;m not a big fan of turkey; always thought it was a little dry. Hopefully my family puts a lot of gravy on that.

The Denver Admissions Information meetings were awesome. I got to meet people really interested into coming to ERAU. I didn’t do much, I only helped with the check in and answering questions at the end of the meeting. It’s cool getting to talk to people and realize that it wasn’t too long ago when I was looking for the right college for me.

Jeni Borge, the Admissions counselor, and Jared Testa, the Chief Flight instructor, were the ones that brought me along on this trip. I was really grateful as if it wasn’t for them, I would not have been able to come home for Thanksgiving. got to see my family for the first time since June.
It was a really fun trip and I am glad I got to go. Jeni and Jared had a lot of fun also. They really liked my mom’s home cooking. Anyways, go to clean the house for tomorrow; fun right?

Ok so Halloween was ok. Didn’t do much of anything. Went to dinner with a couple of friends then just hung out. Didn’t go out trick or treating as I thought it would be a little creepy and weird.

It’s November already and I just found out that i am traveling with the Admissions office to Denver for their Admissions Information Meetings (AIMs). I will be there the weekend of the 21st of Nov. It’s great becasue my hometown is Denver so i am just going to stay the whole week for Thanksgiving Break. It’s going to be great. Alright, got to go, talk to you all soon.

Oh man, producing that paper this past weekend took forever! Using the all flash drive technique was very tedious. Also, we had to use different versions of the software for layout since the computers the paper has were all not working. I really appreciate how my staff used their own computers to read and produce the paper. The end product looked great for the situation.

We got our server and one new computer this week so now we can have a much smoother production next time.

School is ok, flying is fun and I am getting through it quickly and well. I’m shock myself every time I fly or do a sim doing all the things my instructor wants me to do.

I just took a geography test and didn’t do so well. I never thought geography was going to be this hard especially since I got an A in High School. But then again it was high school geography. It’s funny because I get an A in every single homework but when it comes to the test, I blank out and don’t do as well as I would like to.

Same story with weather, I don’t do as well on tests. I got a descent grade but I would have liked to seen it a little higher. I guess I need to study a lot more, and not put work in front of school that much.

Halloween is coming up and I still have no idea what I am going to be. I was thinking either Stewie or Kyle from South Park. The only problem with doing Stewie is I have no idea how I am going to do that football head he has. I guess I have a little while to figure it out. As for now, I leave you and will write soon to tell you all more stories.

Oh man, this weekend was amazing! All the festivities, events, the band was awesome, and the comedian on Saturday was great! All my reporters did their job and wrote their articles. Everything was going smoothly until the Horizons Newspaper server crashed.

It was Saturday afternoon when the server froze so my Photography editor did a hard shut down. When he restarted it, the operating system did not want to load. We worked on it all night trying to figure something out but no matter what we did, it wouldn’t work
I was able to recover the files from the faulty hard drive and attempted to get the paper done but the other computers we had we are not working well. Our equipment is close the six years old so I guess it was due to it crashing, I just didn’t expect it to happen now. We were planning on getting new equipment for next semester meanwhile we get the money but now it looks like we are going to order some now.

In the end, we were not able to get the paper done so we had to push it back to next weekend and have the special edition come out as an insert in the regular issue. Since we still don’t have a server, we have to do production on flash drives and on several different laptops with different versions of the software we use. It’s going to be an interesting production.

On a lighter note, I went flying this friday for fun with my roommate. It was a really fun flight and a very windy one. We went to Payson to get some breakfast and pie (the pie at Payson is legendary). One of my other roommates was supposed to come with us but he is a soccer player and his coach told him they had practice so he couldn’t go. Wished he did because the flight was a lot of fun.

It was windy all over Payson and Prescott and the landing in Payson was sketchy but we made it down safely. Breakfast and pie were great and it was not that expensive. After we ate, we made our way back to Prescott.

On the way back, we did Zero Gravity so my bags in the back were floating all the way up to the ceiling. It was funny seeing roommate react to me suddenly pitching forward to do zero g’s. His expression was priceless.

Landing was challenging. There were winds gusting up to 25 and it was coming from the left making it a crosswind. Nevertheless, it was one of the smoothest landings I have ever done even if there were no wind at all. It was an overall great flight.

I can’t believe it’s already October. It’s been hard keeping up with work and school but I am able to manage it … so far.

Octoberwest is this weekend which is the homecoming celebrations for student, faculty, staff, and alumni. It is going to be a packed weekend full with BBQs, the traditional alumni volleyball game, and a treasure hunt. There is even a tribute band playing on friday playing songs from The Eagles; can’t wait for that.

Since it is Octoberwest this weekend, Horizons Newspaper is going to try and come out with a special edition in between regular issues so it will for three weeks, our bi-monthly paper will be a weekly paper. I got a good plan for editors and journalists to work together and get things done a lot more effectively and efficiently.

Since I also work also in the admissions office as a tour guide, I can expect to see a lot of industry representatives come and take tours of the school.

As part of the Octoberwest festivities, a career expo is held every year for students and recent alumni seeking jobs to connect with the industry. Many engineering and security companies as well as airlines come to represent their company and giving the opportunity to students to possibly get a job. We had ours yesterday and I was please to hear that I was doing all the right things to have a good chance getting an internship and later a job. Since I am still a sophomore working on my instrument rating, there were not a lot of internships that I qualified for but come next year, I should be able to apply for more.

I’ll write again next week and update you on how Horizons went this weekend for the Ocotoberwest Special Edition.

It’s been two week since my last entry and several things have happened since. To begin with, flying is awesome! I am doing so well! It’s weird, it’s like I already know this stuff. I am learning it all so fast and well. I am just learning the basic instrument maneuvers and the control and performance flying method.

The control and performance method is using certain controls and instruments for the desired performance. It is a fairly simple concept but applying it takes a lot of practice. For practice, I did a vertical S maneuver which consists of climbing and descending at 400 feet per minute for 500 feet. This one really teaches you to fly the plane by known power settings and and brings out your weaknesses in the control and performance method. For the first time doing it, it was ok. It’s just fine tuning all the things is what I need to work on.

Horizons came out with a new issue last week and it is the best to date. We had all of our editorial staff there and the editing and design was great. This paper has gotten many compliments and has definitely helped us re-gain some of our credibility back. We also had more people join our team of reporters so our staff now is close to 20. This paper is definitely growing.

School is going ok. Weather class is getting a lot tougher as more concepts are introduced and it has been getting hard to keep up with homework with all the work I’m doing. It’s all about balancing things out. A system Im still trying to grasp before the end of the semester.

I finally got my instructor so I began my flight training. He is really cool and a very good pilot. He is part of the Standards team meaning that he is one of the pilots that gives check rides so he can give me pointers on how to be better prepared to pass a check ride. I can’t wait until we get to do the actual instrument stuff.

School overall, is ok. Enjoying most of my classes but I am seeing that overloading myself every Tuesday and Thursday and having Monday, Wednesday, and Friday off was kind of a bad idea. I work when I am not in school and I fly at night so my time is limited. Also, I am the Editor-in-Chief of Horizons, Embry-Riddle Prescott’s campus newspaper, so that takes up a lot of my time.

Last Wednesday we released a new issue of Horizons and it did not come out well. Only four out of the seven editors could make it making it very hard to complete the issue. It was rushed and did not get edited as mush as it should have been. Several misspellings, and the design was very rushed. Our faculty advisor told me that this was one of the worst issues he has seen in five years. I was really embarrassed and all these mistake caused us our credibility. It’s going to take hard work to get people interested in the paper again.

The good thing about the paper is that that staff keeps on growing slowly. We started out with 12 people and have already added 3 more staff writers in one week. There are a couple of people that look like they have editor potential that could help out a lot with the overall product. Let’s just hope things get better from now on.