Summer Recap

Today is the last day of summer; tomorrow, classes begin. It's been a good run I'd say, definitely up there in my top summers and very possibly the best overall. This post is just a quick recap of events and thoughts.

I started off the summer with a few weeks living at home, before coming back and moving in to my apartment. It's the first time I've ever lived alone, and while there were annoyances, the benefit of not having a roommate overwhelmed all of them. Not that my roommates these past years have been terrible, but it's just nice to have my own space where I don't have to deal with anyone.

At the beginning of August, I moved out of my apartment and back home, then immediately left to go to Gen Con for half a week. While there were some personal problems, Gen Con itself was great, and I'll definitely be returning next year. Afterwards, I spent the last 2 weeks of summer at home, visiting family. Got new lenses for my glasses, got 2 cavities filled, and got my hair cut. Moved back up to West Lafayette the day before yesterday on Friday, and then had this weekend to settle in.

I spent most of the summer living there and working at ITaP, either in the DLC or being farmed out to help with incoming freshman. I did some volunteer work with high-schoolers looking at Purdue, and went to a few festivals and events sin Lafayette. The lack of classes was impactful, because even though I was working 20-40 hours a week, there was no homework and it ended up being much less than an average college semester.

During non-peak moments at work, I spent my time pushing my web development skills. I increased my knowledge of HTML and CSS (learning about HMTL5 and CSS3 as well), and taught myself jQuery, PHP, and mySQL. Obviously the last three I'm not an expert at, but I have enough basic understanding that with the internet as a reference guide I can do anything I want.

I finished up the schedule creator tool to go along with my Purdue ICS Templates, and created a dynamic data table to test out PHP and mySQL. Lastly, I finalized the design for my new website, which will launch sometime this Fall.

Overall I'd call it a very productive summer. I worked enough to pay my expenses and save a little, and learned some useful skills. Not to mention I just enjoyed the experience of living on my own. Classes start tomorrow morning ... senior year, here we go.