So this past weekend was a lot of fun. Busy but a lot of fun. We had our initiation for Sigma Chi where we inducted 3 outstanding individuals into our order. Can’t say what we did since it is a secret so I you want to find out, come join Sigma Chi! 🙂 Formal was great! We had it in the Manzanita Grill next to the Golf Course by the airport. We had the whole room rented out for us and the dinner was amazing! Prime Rib is what I had. I really liked everything about it. We had some of our Alumni come down so it was a great time meeting them and catching up. That’s one thing that I want to say, the bonds that I have made in Sigma Chi are lifelong. That is how ERAU also is. there are some many good people here on this campus that you are going to find and make some great relationships here. Plus the experiences that you are going to go through with them are ones that will make some great stories to share with your parents, grandparents, and future kids! Or just share with other Embry-Riddle students. Anyways, just wanted to share my great experience with you all. Wait until next week. I am going to fly the Airbus A320 full motion Sim in U.S. Airways! Anyways TTYL!
Category Archives: 2013 – 2014
Embry-Riddle Jazz Band!
Every Thursday night, the Embry-Riddle jazz band practices various songs and simply having fun playing our instruments! The music club on campus offers a jazz band, orchestra, choir, drumline and rock groups. My favorite instrument to play is the alto saxophone and I absolutely love to play it.
In practice, we play songs out of various books, including some great classics of Duke Ellington and Herbie Hancock. The group size varies every week, but we always have a drummer, saxophones, trumpets, a guitar, a bass, and even a tuba! It does not matter what instrument you play, we accept everyone who wants to play an instrument!
At the end of first semester, we played in a gig in downtown Prescott for Acker night which is a night of music in the courthouse area during the holiday season. This semester we are performing in a “Night of the Arts” here on campus. The jazz band will play a set of songs (TBA) but we are not the only ones performing. If musicians want, they can combine to make a jazz combo group, or even perform solo! In any case, the night is for having fun and playing on your favorite instrument!
After practice sometimes, there are a few of us who stick around for a random after-practice jam session! Some of switch instruments, like me, but we fool around and play music that isn’t in our books. Also, this time is where some learn a new instrument, or maybe play another’s to see what its like to play a bass, for example. If you have ever played an instrument, or want to learn, the music club, especially the jazz band, is the right club to join!
Spring Has Sprung
Well, it’s finally SPRING! And four weeks from today is the last day of classes! I can’t believe how quickly this year has flown by! I’m almost halfway done with college, which absolutely blows my mind. My classes this year have been awesome. I also registered for my classes for the fall. I am taking Chinese 3, Studies in Global Intelligence 1, History of Modern Europe, Introduction to the US Legal System, and Deceptions. I am so excited. The good thing about going to Riddle is that you have to take only a few general classes and the rest are completely focused on your degree, so you don’t have to have two full years of classes you couldn’t care less about, like at other community colleges or universities. Right at the beginning I was able to take classes that were pertinent to my major, which I absolutely loved, and it just keeps getting better from there!
ERAU Volleyball is getting better every day as well! This past weekend we played in a spring tournament at University of Arizona in Tucson. We left at five in the morning to play a nine o’clock game, and we played all day to keep in shape for our season in the fall. There were a lot of teams from nearby schools at the tournament, like NAU, ASU, UNM, NMSU, Yavapai, GCU, and of course, U of A. It was a blast for our team, and was a blast from the past for our assistant coach, Jill Blasczyk, who played for U of A when she was going to school there. We even got to see pictures of her playing in the hallways of the stadium. What a stud. After the tourney, we got to hang out at one of the restaurants on the U of A campus called Gentle Ben’s, where pretty much the whole school was rooting for their team in the March Madness basketball game. I think Jill was cheering louder than everyone… ha!
Here we are after the tournament in the U of A stadium. Go Eagles!
I just love the spring semester. This spring tournament was a blast, and I’m excited to be registered for the fall semester, and now I have to get ready for…. FINALS! Gotta love it!
“Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.”
-Anthony J. D’Angelo
Spring Break is over :(
I cannot believe how fast that went. Brussels, Bruges, Amsterdam, Las Vegas, and now school…again. Not saying school is bad, but it’s really hard to beat this European Adventure. I had a great time and got really close with the people I traveled with. Only 45 days left until I graduate and I can’t wait! All I got to do is finish my classes, and flight and then done!
I mentioned in my first sentence that I also went to Las Vegas this last week. It was a last minute thing and I went on a recruiting trip with the Admissions office. I left the next day after we got back from Europe and came back to Prescott yesterday. Doing this recruitment event, I got to meet families and accepted students and shared with them how fun, educative, and interesting our school is. Now I’m not going to recruit you reading this, well at least not yet :), but I just wanted to share how enthusiastic those students were. They reminded me of when I was deciding for schools and also of the experiences that I have lived here at ERAU. These experiences are so valuable to me and so important that it is going to be hard to graduate this Spring. I have learned s much and this school has shaped me so well as an individual, both as a student/employee and as a man. I owe so much to this school for what it has done to me. I really hope that the students that were at the reception saw how great Embry-Riddle is. This is the best decision I have done in my life so far, attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
Getting Ready for Fall!
Spring break has gone by so fast! It has been so great having this week off of school. No matter how much I love to learn, a week off of school is always appreciated. Last week was midterms and let me tell you…it was CRAZY! I’ve been spending these last weeks buried in books, studying for all my tests. Also over the last couple weeks I’ve been making some big decisions about my future at Embry-Riddle. I registered for my fall classes recently. I am going to be taking Plant Biology, Chinese 5&6, Intelligence Writing, and Business Statistics next semester. They all seem pretty interesting. I am most looking forward to Intelligence Writing because I am curious about the structures and format of Intelligence writing. Chinese should be fun too. I can’t believe after this spring semester I will have completed my minor in Mandarin in just one year! I am excited to continue learning more and more Chinese next semester. Another big decision I recently made is that next fall I am going to be a Resident Assistant! I am so excited to be an R.A. and hopefully make some students freshman year lots of fun! Who knows maybe I’ll end up being your R.A.!
Amsterdam!
We have been in Amsterdam since Monday night. My first impression is that it was not as great went I went to it last summer. The people do seem a little more apprehensive than before. Maybe it’s the cold. Either way, Amsterdam has been fun. We have gone to see the Van Gough Museum, Anne Frank’s house (where she hid during WWII), the Heineken Brewery, went shopping for the girls (the ones that went on the trip with us), and did some regular sight seeing ending with nights at the local bars and brew pubs meeting the locals. This is our last day here and I don’t want to go back, well maybe for the free refills but not anything else. Yes, free refills. Anywhere in Europe we went, if we wanted more of a drink, like soda or water, we had to pay more for it. Our guess was because they don’t have fountain drinks like we do but just the bottles. Either way, not having a free refill is really hard during meals especially when I drink a lot during meals.
A quick story before I go back out to see another museum in Amsterdam, when we went to the Heineken Brewery, the cashier that gave us our tickets to go in, he knew what Embry-Riddle was! Amazing right! halfway across the world and they know about ERAU. He knew because one of his friends went to the Florida campus, that’s when we told him that he should have attended the Prescott campus :). Funny how small this world is, someone all the way in Europe knowing about Embry-Riddle. Anyways, got to go! TTYL! Next time it will be states side though!
Belfort, Trains, Fish, and Waffles…oh Belgium
So, we landed in Amsterdam yesterday at 6:30am. We lost 8 hours of our lives on that flight so the jetlag hit us hard. We decided to take a train to Brussels and kinda explore a little around the area. We get there, find our hotel and then go out to eat…kinda. Actually it was more like, I get everyone lost getting to our hotel taking a complete wrong turn so the trip was off on the wrong foot. Brussels was ok, the people were a little rude but that could just be the culture. Today we took the train to Bruges to do a similar thing, get to know the city. I was so glad that I was able to read a map and actually get us to where we needed to go. Felt kinda dumb though especially since ERAU drilled us at ready maps and scetionals during ground school. It all got figured out in the end so it’s all good.
Anyways, Bruges was amazing! SO much history, so many cool things, and so pretty and relaxing. We climbed up the Belfort, went into the Church of the Holy Blood, had some awesome seafood, and of course, a Belgian Waffle. I would talk a lot about each thing we saw but it would be a small essay so I am going to leave you with this. If you plan on going to Belgium, go to Bruges. SO much better than Brussels. Hope you enjoy the pictures below!
Spring Break!
So my first day of Spring Break and in one hour me and three friends are going to Europe for Spring Break! Now we are not by any means rich kids but we found a great deal that we couldn’t pass up! It was $300 round trip ticket to Amsterdam and back! Amazing right! I really like the people that I am going with so it should be a fun trip. Now I need to get ready for the 2 hour ride to Phoenix. That’s one thing, ERAU is 2 hours away from a major airport. This can be both good and bad. Good because by not having a major airport close to Prescott, the city is always quieter, not a lot of people all while living a large town life. The bad thing is the 2 hour ride to/from Phoenix especially after a long flight. But honestly, I think it’s worth the drive for the sort of lifestyle that Prescott offers. Nice outdoor peaceful but yet actively lifestyle. Anyways, time to finish getting ready TTYL!
Flying from the right seat is weird
I have had a 2 flights this past week. Since I am in the CFI flight course, I get to do all the flying from the right seat instead of the left (which is what I have been doing for the past 3.5 years). Naturally, it all looks weird to me; like driving a car from the passenger seat. I feel like I am flying a brand new aircraft and learning my private pilot certificate all over again. It has been very challenging and sometimes my performance is not the best, but nevertheless, it has been fun.
The cool thing about it is that I am beginning to look at every single maneuver I have done in a very different way. I am learning to break down every maneuver step by step so I can teach it to my future students. In fact, I am learning how to do the maneuvers better myself since I am breaking them down so much. I have a great instructor that is always motivating me and showing me really cool pointers along the way. That is what I hope to become this summer, an ERAU flight instructor. My instructor is so motivating and so friendly and knowledgeable that I cannot wait to be the same with students of my own. Embry-Riddle looks like a place that I would love to work for, at least until I get my hours for the airlines. Until then, ERAU is what I am looking to do.
A Much-Needed Break
This semester has been very hectic and busy, but it has been a lot of fun. I have come to realize that changing my major to Global Security and Intelligence has been the best choice I have made! I enjoy all my classes. I especially enjoy going to my Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes- U.S. Foreign Policy and Social Psychology. I have been learning a lot in my Foreign Policy class about how history has shaped our policies overtime. It is very fascinating and Dr. Trombley makes the class energetic and fun. In psychology, we are performing social experiments. My group did an experiment on conformity where we used a generalized horoscope (printed 12 of them out and put the different horoscope signs on the top of each) and handed them out to students and staff members. We asked how much the profile pertained to them from a scale of 1 to 5. It was very interesting to see how many people felt that their horoscope was completely dead on! More students gave higher ratings than adults, proving that students are more conforming. They are taking the generalized statements and molding them into their own beliefs. It was a lot of fun.
Although I am having a lot of fun at school, I am very thankful and excited for Spring Break! I will be going to California to see my family. I’ll be going to Six Flags, Disneyland, and to San Diego for the beautiful temple and beach over there. It should be a great week. I am going with Jeff, my boyfriend. We have to come back Thursday night though, in order to finish all our assignments and projects before that upcoming Monday. It will be a great time though, and I am just so great that Embry Riddle gives us some time off. The classes are fun and the teachers are informative, but if I learn any more this week or if I have to do another exam or homework assignment, I think my head may explode!
I am also excited for next semester because I have my new schedule! I will be taking Intelligence writing and Intelligence studies, Studies of Middle Eastern Cultures, Environmental Economics, and Arabic I. I am extremely excited to take the economics class! Dr. Carreras has his Doctorate in Environmental Economics, so this class should be extra fun and informative. I also cannot wait to start a new language! I almost chose Chinese, but I realized that more countries recognize Arabic. I will let you guys know how Arabic goes. Dr. Jones says there will be a new professor, so I will see if that ends up being a good or bad thing. I hope everyone has a safe and great vacation this week. (Or whenever your spring break is) Just remember to relax over your break, so you won’t be too overwhelmed coming back. :]
