graduation

I did it. It's over. I'm done.

On 12-13-14, I crossed the stage and turned my tassel, signifying the end of 3.5 years of work towards undergrad degrees in Finance and Accounting. Before the actual stage crossing, they had us stand up for various achievements - cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude. I knew that one would happen - they were nice enough to tell me that when they handed me my silver summa cord. Right after we sat down, they announced that 15 of us were graduating with a perfect 4.0. We stood. I got hit in the face with my tassel for the second time when I turned to look at my parents. That recognition kind of made all the hard work and insanity worth it.

Huge thanks to my mom and dad for more things that I could ever list (including talking me into taking accounting back in high school, making me dinner all the nights I studied - without expecting me to clean up afterwards, for listening to my rants about group work, for making me go to bed when it hit 2am, and for not making me go to bed during my one all-nighter). Thanks to Meagan and Travis, for being two of the best friends I could ever have, for making me laugh when I needed it, distracting me at all the right times, and for always having more confidence in me than I had in myself. Meg - I'm so glad we met our first semester and I'm so thankful that we wanted to be friends with each other as much as the other one did. Travis - when we met, I never expected you'd come to one of my graduations, let alone two. 

Hugs and kisses to my family, who constantly tell me they're proud of me, and major love to my grandfather, for coming to my graduation and promising to come to all future ones. 

Big thanks to my capstone group - one of two groups that I've really liked - and I hope we keep using the group chat for a long time. 

High fives to Chris (for putting up with me every semester of college and for all the things we did that made people think we were dating... and for keeping me sane(ish) for the past three years), Jess (for being part of both groups I liked, and for being awesome), Kaelyn (for being part of the first great group and for being excited about Christmas cards), and Caitlin (for being my buddy even when we lived five hours apart)... WE DID IT, Y'ALL. 

More high fives to Shelby (for being my first best friend and coming to graduation), Chelsi (for being my second best friend and reminding me to have fun), Clifford (for bantering with me since day 1... literally... and for convincing me to get an iPhone), Alex (for being my favorite Navy boy), Miranda (for being an awesome friend and fellow gluten free pizza and beach loving lady), Maverick (for making me be nice and also other reasons), Nick (because we went to high school together but weren't friends until much later), Cassie from work (for being the best person to replace me and for sharing gluten free cake with me), Shay (for being my lil sister), Jennifer (for taking me under your wing from the beginning), Chrissy (for being an awesome little and a great fellow big), Noel, Kelsey, Nikki, Logan, and Myranda (for being the greatest honors littles ever), K, Tyler G., Tyler H., and James (for being my littles from TM and not being weirded out by my crazy), Justin (even though you annoy the living daylights out of me sometimes), and to everyone I didn't mention right now. I have a lot of people to thank and if I love you, you know it.

That said, only the undergraduate degree is done. Grad school starts January 21st. I'm not going to think about that just yet. Instead, here's a bunch of pictures from graduation.

 And one of my absolute favorites:

(: 

let's talk about capstone: basics

So quick recap - I'm a business major. Finance and accounting. I love them both when they're taught properly (read: I'm falling back in love with finance and generally happier with my classes this semester). At TAMUCC, business majors have this class that is fondly (lol) referred to as "capstone". It's a management class technically, but it combines everything we learned in business core classes. It's a huge, semester-long group project. There are five people in my group - four girls and one guy. I'll say right off the bat that I had my doubts. The guy and I have been friends (or classmates, at least) since I started college, and we were dead set on being in the same capstone group. One of the ladies in the group, I had in a different group project (the first group I ever really liked, actually), so when we found out we were in the same class again, we agreed to join forces. Now we had three out of six (at the time). The other two ladies joined the group, and we were able to be the one group in the class with five people.
Score.
I'm pretty comfortable with the group we have. We all seem to get along pretty well, and we laugh and panic and have inside jokes about falling off cliffs and jumping out of windows. We're only a little bit of the way in to the semester, but our first presentation is tomorrow (ack!) and I think we'll survive.

It starts with Macro Environment analysis - so everything outside of the industry. Demographics, political/legal, sociocultural, technological... things I'm forgetting. It's basically the big picture. From there, we look at the firms we choose to put in our industry. We hit a snag here because we put firms in the industry that didn't belong there, which left us scrambling tonight to fix it. There was also another little hiccup because we looked at the 10-Ks from 2013 instead of 2014 (which gives you 2013 data... as opposed to 2012 data from the 2013 10-Ks). Anyway, all that is fixed now, so it's just putting the powerpoint together and actually figuring out what we're going to say. That'll happen tomorrow morning. The stress will be over in about 14 hours. (Still definitely wanting to panic...)

I planned to write a little more on the actual process of this, but it's late and I'm sleepy. I'll write another post with the things we need to fix after the presentation.

82 days until graduation.

one step closer

I applied for graduation today. On December 13, 2014, at a time TBA, I'll walk across the stage and graduate with an undergraduate degree in Finance and Accounting. That is exactly 13 weeks from today.

Am I excited? Oh, yes.
Am I terrified? Absolutely.
Do I know exactly what I'm doing next? Of course not.

All I know at this point is that it's happening, and fast.

Next up is (I think) ordering a cap and gown, taking the pictures for and making my graduation announcements/invitations, taking the GMAT, applying for grad school, trying not to go crazy...

The point of this post is just to document the 13-week mark and to warn you that I'll have lots of graduating college / getting into grad school stuff.