On Top of the World and I'm Feeling just fine.

12 stories high, there is a roof I have admired for the past 3 years. It's called the SWKT, and ever since little freshman Abigail came to BYU she has wanted to get on top of it. Unfortunately, the door is always locked. I think it used to be open to the public, but then students decided that throwing paper airplanes and pennies off of 12 stories would be a lot of fun or something (though to admit, throwing a paper airplane from that roof would be a lot of fun, so...) I knew that every so often they would hold tours up there, but I always seemed to find out about them the day after they happened.

Spoiler to this story: I DID IT

Conveniently I have a best friend who is a nursing major that spends a lot of time in the SWKT and sees pertinent posters. (Here we are on the top! I don't even care that you can't see the city behind us, because let's be real, that girl IS the view #wifethat #ohwaitSOMEONEALREADYDID. Good call on that Matthew.)

Lis must like me a lot, because she helps me cross of a lot of my #byubucketlist. There's a picture with us and Cosmo somewhere, she was definitely the brave one who asked. I'm real lucky to have her as a friend, and I'm glad that I can still hang out with her sometimes even though she's married and married people are supposed to be boring. We fight through that. Also, Matthew is pretty cool, so that helps.

Okay, this was not meant to be a Lissa appreciation post. I mean, there's a lot of appreciation I have for her, so it makes sense that this would happen like every post, but I digress.


I don't know why, but a lot of my bucket list revolves around heights. I don't really see the appeal of skydiving, because that seems unnecessarily reckless. But I do want to ride a helicopter, summit Y mountain, get on the top of buildings, etc. I love being able to see everything around me for miles. I think it somehow makes me feel small, but on top of the world as well. While life can get really hard sometimes, taking a step back (or rather, a step up) puts life into perspective. We can get so caught up in that bad things that our happening in our own little world. When we can see a world that is bigger than what we see on our daily basis, I think it brings the realization that spilling something on our shirt, or tripping in front of a cute boy isn't going to end the world, because the world is, surprisingly, much bigger than ourselves.

President of BYU, Kevin Worthen quoted Thoreau saying "Some will remember no doubt , not only that they went to college, but that they went to the mountain." He continues to talk about how mountains are have historically, and continue to be, places of instruction, places of communication and revelation, and places of transfiguration where people are transformed and changed in significant ways. Being a midwest girl, where the saying is that you can "stand on a stepstool and see the back of your head" because the terrain is so flat, I have always loved the mountains. I'm glad that I did as Thoreau said, and went not only to college, but to the mountains too. 

Anyway, this has been a really long way of saying, that I live in a pretty place. 

I just met a girl named....Sophiaaaaaaaa

Sophia is my roommate. And by I just met her, I mean, I met her two and a half years ago. We were randomly assigned to be roommates freshman year, and I cannot imagine what my college experience could have been like without her. Fun fact: Before moving in, I tried to transfer out of our apartment because I wanted to be in a building closer to campus. I had a mini existential crisis and decided to stay in the room I had first gotten into, because what if those girls would have been the best people I'd ever met? Let me tell you, divine intervention is a thing, because all of my best friends I met because of that apartment.

She had mentioned freshman year that all she had ever wanted for her birthday was for someone to make a video of the people she loved in life saying nice things about her. Her love language is words of affirmation, if you couldn't figure that out :) Anyways, cut to now, I was super sneaky ("Hey, I should probably get your mom's phone number, for like, emergency reasons or something". "I wish my family took home videos growing up....Did your family do that ever??") So sneaky.

Anyways, I have a lot of love for this girl, and turns out, there are a lot of other people who have love to give her too. Happy birthday Soph!

Highs and Lows

There are a lot of feelings that happen. Remember that time I got an internship? So I talked to them on the phone and it was great! They told me that they were so excited that I was interested in coming, and they told me what they were hoping I could do for them (creating a sex education campaign, and bringing it to refugees and college students) Like, I know I'm a teaching assistant for an infectious disease course and that I volunteered with refugees and that I wrote that all of that on my resume, BUT YOU THINK I CAN DO THE THINGS I WROTE ON MY RESUME? THAT"S SUCH A GROWN UP THING. WHY AM I BEING A GROWN UP??

That was exciting. So exciting! In a health department? Working with infectious disease? That's exactly what I want! So thats the high of this post.

Low of the post.

So I went to go talk to my advisor about the internship, just to make sure that I'd be able to cross all the T's and dot all the I's. She was really negative about it, which was super weird. In her words, "I only advise, you decide" (she said that several times, apparently I'm not a very convincing advisee). She felt really strongly that doing the internship was a bad idea and that I shouldn't do it, because it's a year earlier than everyone else generally does theirs. In the health program, students most often do their internship after their senior year, because they don't have the internship pre-requisites done. Also that way if the internship turns into a job offer, they won't have any classes left to take and can accept.

But like, I have all my classes done, and I planned it that way so that I could do an internship inbetween my junior and senior year. Mostly because I didn't want to go back to my hometown and work at a grocery store for 60 hours a week, which I've done every summer for the past 5 years. Ugh. I just wanted to feel like I was moving forward in life. So I've been planning all my classes so that I could do this internship on my timetable. So I really threw a wrench in my plans when suddenly I had an advisor telling me not to do this. Suddenly visions of working in a menial, no-brained jobs for 4 months with no friends.

Needless to say, I skipped the rest of my classes so that I could go home and cry for the rest of the day.

So I called my mom that day. Within 2 seconds of me on the phone she asked me what was wrong. (shoutout to mother's intuition). After talking to her, I talked to Papa about the same exact thing, and he gave me the same advice. My mother gets SO MAD when that happens, because she says that no one will ever listen to her until my father repeats her advice. Sorry about that mom, I promise you're great.

And because I'm someone who talks a lot, I called one more person, Michelle. Michelle is my public health mom. She's in the program with me, though a couple semesters ahead of me. We've had a bunch of classes together, and she is really one of the most incredible women that I know. She's doing her internship in DC, and so I called her, and she told me all the things my parents told. Again. So I guess the moral this story is that I don't learn anything by being taught just once.

I don't know whats going to happen. I don't know if this internship will work. But I do know that there are people in this world that I like a lot, and no matter what happens, it's all going to work. It'll all work out.

It is going to work out.