The Exclusive List

Alright... it is almost midnight and I cannot sleep. Don't have a good book to read either--they are all packed! Tomorrow I leave for LA, and on Wednesday I catch my flight to Santiago. When I am in LA I hope to spend the evening with a few friends that are there for the summer.

Well, here is that final list of graduate schools that I have been working on applications for. They are all APA accredited programs in counseling psychology:

1.) University of Oregon, PhD. Eugene OR.

2.) University of Denver, MA. Denver CO.

3.) University of Minnesota, PhD. Minneapolis, MN.

4.) University of Missouri--Columbia, MA. Columbia, MO.

5.) University of Missouri--Kansas City, PhD. Kansas City, MO.

6.) University of Illinois, PhD. Urbana, IL.

7.) Loyola University, MA. Chicago, IL.

8.) University of Indiana, PhD. Bloomington, IN.

9.) Boston College, PhD. Boston, MA.

10.) New York University, PhD. New York, NY.

11.) Fordham University, PhD. New York, NY.

12.) Columbia University Teacher's College, MA. New York, NY.

13.) Seton Hall University, PhD. South Orange, NJ.

14.) University of Miami, PhD. Coral Gables, FL.

Leave your comments below giving me so good rationale as to why I should attend your favorite pick! :)

"It's the final count down..."

I leave for LA in three days to get my visa, and once I am there I will stay overnight and pick up the visa on the next morning. Ojalá the chilean consulate will have my visa ready as they say it is... After that I am on to Dallas where I connect to Santiago!

Right now I have four major tasks before I leave on Tuesday afternoon.

Uno: Pack. A small detail, I know. For those of you that know me well... I do have a lot of, well... stuff, and I am learning very quickly how to enjoy it less and less. Since I have moved back from Iowa to Colorado I have had 4/5 of all of my things in storage because I do not have space for it right now. Now that I am packing it is the ultimate challenge. I must determine how to pack my life into two suitcases that are both under 50 pounds. This fondly calls the question though of how much I will have on my return back... when Diogo, my host brother who lived with us from Portugal left, we had to send a box of items home and then had to sit at the airport re-distributing items in his bags to avoid overweight bag charges. Again, in May I did this with Ruairi from Ireland who spent a year at Cornell and frantically needed to get everything he accrued into his 2 bags...

Dos: Pack. Did I just say that? This time I need to pack everything that is not going with me and put it in storage at my dad's house. This should be pretty easy since I only have essentials with me right now... or what I thought to be essentials before I realized that I again would have to downsize again when I moved down to Chile!

Tres: Peptobismal. I am just being honest... when you spend time with an entire new diet in a different country, your system needs some support for the adjustment! Trust me on this one.

Cuatro: Applications. Since I am going to be so far away I have had to make a lot of considerations and decisions for graduate school applications pretty early so that I could get a lot of things mailed early. I have already sent out all of my letter of recommendation forms to my professors to fill out (which took over 10 hours to prepare from beginning to end!). I have also started working on some of the applications, updated my curriculum vitae, and have been making other considerations of how I am going to compile all of these paper documents while I am in Chile. I think that this blog is going to have many accounts of grad school applications since I will have to work on these details while I am abroad. Thank goodness I already have my school list narrowed down and have been working out all of the tiny details for each program. I will post a list of my schools I am applying to for those who care to know.

So, regarding the four things that I need to do before I leave, I conclude by saying, "One of these things is not like the other..."

Preparing For a Trip in the Dark

Getting ready to live in Chile has been so much more work than I expected... I knew that there would be a lot of considerations to fulfill before leaving, but the amount of time taken to fulfill these tasks has been unreal. I think that what has been most difficult for me is the fact that every decision I have needed to make has been contingent on forces outside of my control. For example, the Chilean Consulate would not tell me when my visa would be ready, which meant that it would be risky to purchase a ticket to Chile because it would be difficult to leave without getting my visa first. And then the prices of tickets started going up and I began to panic, which did not phase the Consulate. Finally, yesterday I found out when I could go to LA to pick up my visa, which meant that I could book my flight to Santiago. Luckily I found a fairly inexpensive ticket... especially considering that I will be leaving from Denver on June 30. From there I will pick up my visa, and fly on July 1 to Chile, arriving on July 2. In case you are wondering... I will be there until December 18. I sense that Chilean culture operates on a different time than I am used to in the States; I guess it is a good lesson in patience for me! That being said, I hope that once I get down there that I know what is going on--up until this point I have felt totally in the dark! Thank goodness for the help from my grandma, aunt and mom's help over the past few weeks as I have tried to get all of these details straightened out.