It’s my last week at work; next week I’ll be back in Philly for school! It’s time for me to go through my mental checklist of what I need to get sorted before winter break ends, which mostly consists of updating my resume and LinkedIn, consolidating my class schedule and figuring out which classes I want to shop during the first week, prepping everything for Her Campus Bryn Mawr, and drafting as many blog posts as I can so that I don’t have to worry too much about it once school starts, because who knows how crazy it’ll get? Oh, and if I have any time to read, that’d be nice to squeeze in too.

New month of the new year falling on a new week! Too many blog posts to draft and I haven’t been keeping up, what with just coming back from Okinawa and jumping right into my internship. There’ll be a full blog post on Okinawa next week, fingers crossed. As for my internship, it’s been going well. I have friends at work, with whom I always get lunch with. My supervisors are kind and cool, and have given me two tasks so far, one of which has a concrete deliverable that I finished the day after it was assigned to me, though I had a week for it, and the second of which doesn’t really have a concrete deliverable, so it’s harder to say what my progress is. I hope I get more work because I was feeling a bit bored by Friday (but don’t get me wrong, it was fulfilling doing my work when I had it). Despite having a chill time at work, I can’t use company time/resources (computers) to do my own work (blogging), so I was really marinating in boredom. I need to come up with things to do when I have downtime at work and brainstorm ways to show more initiative.

This family baking party actually happened over the summer, but I never got around to sharing it on the blog because there were too many other things to share! I thought now would be a good time to finally publish this post because what says the holidays like baking and family time? And also I’m flying home to Beijing today and seeing my family (winter break, here I came!), so here’s a little ode to them.

I’m flying home to Beijing on Wednesday for winter break! (And then flying to Okinawa the following day and staying for a few before going back to Beijing to spend the rest of my winter break??) Just got my last thesis presentation to do tomorrow and I’m done. Is it crazy that I’m looking forward to a break from socialising rather than from academics? Everyone has been feeling the end of the semester closing in and wanting to hang out all the time. We just need to chill out.

Only two more weeks of school ahhh! Here’s the rundown: I only have one class this week, which will be on Tuesday and Thursday, and those classes will just be for in-class presentations; I present with my partner on Tuesday, so that’ll pretty much be the end of my semester haha. UPenn classes have ended (although I still have a final project to work on for that class), and my other two classes are senior seminars, which don’t have class times anymore because we’re just working on finishing up the final draft of our thesis. I’ll have a lot of time this week, so I’ll need to be really good about managing my time; I’m definitely better at managing my time when I have a busier schedule, because the appointments in my schedule break up my time for me. Not that I’m complaining about having a light schedule haha. Then the following week, I’ll be taking my only final exam on Monday, I’ll be giving my final presentation/defense for my thesis on Tuesday, and then I’m flying home on Wednesday!

I’m living for all these vlogmases! If it weren’t for my thesis, I would have loved to give a go at a proper blogmas. During my sophomore year of college, I gave a go at a very simplified blogmas in which I took one iPhone photo a day, starting from the first of December until Christmas day, and shared it as a roundup on my blog (see it here! but heads up, it’s nothing grand), and then I did daily blogging for the twelve days of Christmas. Anywho, watching all these vlogmases is making me feel like I need an advent calendar. At the very least, it’ll soothe the feeling of impending doom as my thesis deadlines approach and help me focus on the impending joy of Christmas. Maybe I’ll get a cheap $1 chocolate advent calendar from Trader Joe’s or CVS. The only thing is that I don’t like milk chocolate, and those seem to be the most common (dark chocolate for me please!). Not that I need more chocolate (recall the four boxes of Snickers peanut butter squared my dad sent me, and I also have some dark chocolate and coconut covered almonds from Trader Joe’s, a bag of Reese’s I got 50% off after Halloween, and a bar of chocolate from a Carreforre in Paris). But there’s something about punching it out of a cardboard box that makes it so much more satisfying, no?