So you might be wondering what I will be doing the rest of this month before I graduate. . .or maybe not, but I will tell you anyway! This Thursday I am going to the O.A.R. concert here at JMU. I am very excited! On the not so fun side, I will be finishing up my senior thesis and presenting it. Our thesis write-up is 53 pages right now! I have two other presentations for two of my classes. Also, I will have two final exams to study for and a paper to write for a class about wireless integration in the PSTN. Sounds exciting, right? I will also have to pick an apartment to live in in the D.C. area. We have narrowed it down to a couple and now we just have to make a decision. I will have to start packing and going through the stuff in my apartment right now to get ready to move out. There is so much to do this month, but I'm sure May 6th will be here before I know it.

After graduation, I plan on going to Myrtle Beach for a week with some of my friends here. There's nothing like some fun in the sun to celebrate graduation! Then I plan on going home to TN for the rest of May and June since that will most likely be the last time I live at home ever. That is very strange to think about! I will also probably go on a backpacking trip with my dad since we do that every year. July 1st I will move to my new apartment and then July 17th I start my job at CGI-AMS! There are so many things to look forward to during the next few months!

As a final word, since this is a blog for ISAT, I would like to say how much I have enjoyed being an ISAT major. It definitely was the right major for me and has provided me with the skills I will need for the real world! The professors and my fellow classmates have all made the experience even more unforgettable.

Thanks for reading my blog!! I enjoyed writing it!

This is the cruise ship!

A view of the Keys from our ship. Look at how pretty the water is!

The view from the beach in Cozumel, Mexico. There were water trampolines and an iceberg to climb in the water!

A group shot at Hammerheads in Grand Cayman

Now that spring break is over we are down to the last few weeks of school. It's really hard to believe that my time here at JMU is coming to an end. There is a lot to do before that though. I have a project to do for just about evey class, not to mention the BIG senior project to finish up. Well since it's only day 2 back at school, that's about all I have to say for now! Have a great week!

Today, for example, is a day that I don't have any classes. However, its not the relaxing day off that I had hoped it would be. At 9am I had to meet with a geology professor here at JMU to pick up documents for my internship in the Synthesis lab. Then at 11am I was supposed to meet with a ranger at the Shenandoah Park Headquarters in Luray (about a 45 minute drive from here) to pick up some other documents. However, thanks to the snow, that meeting will be postponed until Friday. Right now I'm actually in the Synthesis lab in ISAT getting ready to start doing some of the work that needs to be done. Then after that I'm going to grab some lunch and head back to my apartment where I plan to spend at least two hours working on a program for my network programming class. The program I have to make is actually comprised of two programs--a client program and a server program. My task is to implement a scenario where the client program sends the contents of a file to the server and the server writes that file to a destination file. Its definitely not as simple as it sounds.

After working on that program for a couple of hours, I have a senior thesis meeting with my group members and my advisor. We are almost finished with the whole website; there are just a few minor details that we keep finding we need to work on. After the meeting with them, we are then meeting with the sponsors of our thesis to show them what we have done and see what they have to say. Depending upon what they say, we might have more things that need to be done to our project.

Hopefully after the meeting I'll be able to go to UREC and relieve some stress. I always look forward to a good run at UREC. Then its back to the apartment for dinner and working on the program for the rest of the night. Whew, I can't wait until this day is over. Wednesday nights are always the worst because I have to do the homework for all my classes on Thursday, but Wednesday nights are also my last week night and so I can't can't complain! I'm looking forward to Thursday night when my weekend will begin!

Lets see... I know its been awhile since I've written. Since then I have just been doing school work and doing work for my internship. On Mondays and Wednesdays when I don't have classes I work for a few hours for the internship and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I go to my 3 classes. It all works out pretty well. On the weekends I haven't had much work so I have time to hang out with friends and go on trips. Last Saturday I was actually able to go skiing at Wintergreen which was a lot of fun. It snowed all day so it was perfect weather for some skiing! The weekend before that I went to an auto show in DC. There were so many cool cars to look at. It gave me an opportunity to pick out the car I want to buy when I'm rich someday haha. Then we ate at Chinatown for dinner, which was a fun experience because I'd never been to Chinatown.

This weekend I will be going home to Tennessee because I have a dentist appointment. I'm not looking forward to the drive but it will be good to see my family!

Well I think that's it for now! Have a great rest of the week!

That's right... I have a job! Over break I came to the decision to work for CGI-AMS. I am very excited to go work there. Now I am split between wanting to stay at college and wanting to get started with the next part of my life.
Having a job already makes it harder to stay focused with classes, but I guess I can look at the classes as gaining extra experience for my job!

Speaking of classes, I have 3 classes on Tuesday and the same 3 again on Thursday. Although I only have classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, my days off are still filled with meetings and work for the internship that I am still doing. The classes I am taking are Internetworking, Multimedia, and Network Applications Development. They all seem to be interesting. For the Multimedia class, we have already started working on a project that involves making a multimedia presentation with a group. My group will be making a simulation of the solar system. We will have all nine planets and the sun in their orbits and provide facts about each of the planets. I think it will be a fun project to do, especially since I have discovered that my knowledge of the solar system needs some brushing up. In the Network Applications Development class we have started doing programming in C. I have never really had much experience with C, but some of it is similar to Java, so I am hoping to catch on quickly.

In addition to classes, my internship has been keeping me busy lately. We are in the process of starting a new project and there has been a lot of work to do right off the bat. Tomorrow morning there is a meeting with the people who are funding the project, and I will be in charge of telling them what has been done and how we do it. I guess this will be good practice for my job at CGI since I am positive I will have to make presentations at meetings there.

Well I think that about catches you up! Have a great week!

I think in my last blog I was getting ready to go to the CGI- AMS interview. Well, the interview went great, and I received a call from them on Monday extending me an offer! So now I need to decide between IBM and CGI-AMS. I am so bad at making decisions!

It is so hard for me to believe that this semester is coming to an end. I think it has been by far one of the best since I've been at JMU. It makes me want to stay here an extra year! At least I still have one more semester to go, and with the stress of finding a job gone, it should be even better than this semester. Having classes only two days a week will be very cool also! It's sad that some of my friends are December graduates though and won't be here next semester. One of my roommates will be graduating this Saturday. So we will have an empty room in our apartment, and she will be moving to northern Virgina where she has a job. However, I should be seeing plenty of her next year when I move up there!

As far as the rest of exam week goes, I will be staying here until Friday even though my exams are finished tomorrow. I can use this free time to do some Christmas shopping, clean the apartment, and just relax after the last few stressful weeks. Then I will head back to TN to spend the 3 weeks of Christmas vacation. If I'm lucky, we'll be going to Florida the last week of break to spend some time at the beach!

Anyways, this will probably be my last blog this semester since nothing else will be going on for me this week! When break is over in January I will be back at it again though!

Happy Holidays!!

December is such a hectic month, and this next week definitely proves that. I have an exam on Monday in my software engineering class, a presentation Tuesday in my intelligent systems class, a paper due Wednesday in my telecom class, an exam on Thursday in my networking class, and finally a presentation on Friday for software engineering. Whew. It sounds exhausting just to think about. I feel like I will have no time to breathe. On the plus side, exam week will be a breeze since I will only have two exams and no classes! In case you don't know, classes end next Friday on December 9th, and then exam week starts the following Monday. It's nice because you can put all your energy towards studying for your tests since there are no longer classes to worry about. However, I have to survive next week before I can think about the exams I have.

In addition to all of that, I am leaving tonight to go to Fairfax, VA where I will be having yet another interview tomorrow. It's with a company called CGI-AMS. It's one of the largest independent information technology and business process services firms in the world. I am interviewing for a consultant job. This will be my last interview for the year!! I am very excited about that.

I've got to go pack and get some work done! Have a great weekend!

I got some good news when I got back from break though. IBM called and said that they wanted to offer me a job! I was so excited to hear that! I have an interview with CGI-AMS this Friday so I am going to wait to see how that goes before I make any decisions. It's just great to know that I pretty much have a job for when I graduate!

Today I had to drive up to Luray, VA, where the Shenandoah Park Headquarters are located. I am starting a new Synthesis project, and the first step is gathering all the documents that need to be scanned. One of the people providing me with the documents is a Park Ranger at the headquarters so that is why I had to drive up there.

Now I have to go to a senior project meeting. My next few weeks will be filled with meetings and a lot of work.
However, there are only three weeks left before Christmas break!

This past weekend on Saturday I had my interviews at IBM in Fairfax, VA. I was so nervous when I got there because I was in an unfamiliar place and there were so many people in business suits. However, everyone was really nice. They took me to a conference room when I got there where all the other interviewees were waiting too. Two other people from JMU were there so it was nice to see some familiar faces. An IBM employee came into the room and gave a quick talk about IBM before the actual interviewing began. Then we were handed our interview schedules. I had to interview with three people in a row. The interviews were actually not too bad. The people were so nice and made me feel comfortable talking to them. Overall I think it was a good experience, and hopefully I will get a call from IBM soon!

Right now, my group and I are also in the process of trying to finish up our senior project. We finally got the ASP (Active Server Page) code to start working. What this means is that we are trying to connect the database to our website so that when certain pages come up, certain information is pulled from the database and displayed on the webpage. For example, we were able to display all of the people's names who are potential contacts for water related issues and projects from the database onto the People page of our website. When we return from break, we will have to work really hard to get the rest of the webpages working.

I probably will not write any blogs while I'm on Thanksgiving break so I hope that all of you have a great Thanksgiving!!

On another note, it seems so wierd to think of being somewhere warm and sunny because its starting to get windy and cold around here. However, that means the semester is coming to a close. Thanksgiving is next week! I have been working hard the past couple of days on two papers that I have due this week on Wednesday and Thursday. I really want to finish both of them tonight, but we'll see how motivated I am. One of them is supposed to be about a current telecom controversy. After researching, I found out that there is a debate going on right now about who should control the Internet. Pretty much, it is the United States against the rest of the world. It's actually a very interesting topic because depending on what happens at a World Summit this week, the Internet that we know now could change.

I also have an interview at IBM this Saturday, which is cool. However, its also the last football game this Saturday as one of my friends pointed out to me when I was talking about my interview. It makes me kind of sad to miss the last football game since I've attended all the other home games, but the interview is definitely more important!!

Guess I should go work on my papers. Talk to you soon!

Anyway, back to the topic of ISAT. Fortunately, everything is under control with all of my classes, and it seems that the only things standing inbetween me and Thanksgiving break are two papers, a project, and an interview! That doesn't seem too terribly bad. For one of the papers I am still trying to find a topic to write about. It has to be about a telecom issue or controversy that is going on right now. If anyone has any suggestions let me know! The other paper is a project report for the Linux networking project that my group is working on right now. We are in the process of doing the last steps, which involves DNS, DHCP, TCP and a lot of other fun acronyms. After completion, we are required to write a report that tells how we implemented each step and how we verified each step. Hopefully it won't be much harder than the report I had to write for the Windows part of the project. Those papers will certainly keep me busy this weekend.

So I bet you all are wondering if anything ever happened with the interviews that I had about a month ago. Well, I got a call back from one out of the three companies that I interviewed with. All I really wanted was to hear back from one of them! So I will be going back for my second interview with CGI-AMS on December 2. This interview will take place at their office in Fairfax, VA, so it won't be quite as convenient as it was when they came to campus for my first interview. Also, I just had an on-campus interview today with IBM. They actually offered me to come to their office for a second interview at the end of the interview! So I will also be going to Fairfax next week for another interview with IBM. Its all very exciting and scary.

I think thats about all that is going on right now in my life. Have a fabulous weekend!!

This weekend was incredible though because I got to see the JMU Dukes beat William and Mary in football! It was such a nervewracking game because the score was entirely too close the entire game. However we ended up scoring a fieldgoal to win the game 30-29 with only 3 seconds remaining! My voice was definitely a little hoarse the next day from the amount of yelling I did during the game. Also the weather was absolutely beautiful the entire weekend and so the 3 hour drive there and back was not bad at all. Here's a picture of the view from our seats at the game:

click to enlarge

Even though this week is just beginning I know it will fly by just as fast as the rest of them have been! I am going to try to do as much work as possible tonight so that I won't be stressed out later on this week. I have a paper due next Tuesday, and since Thanksgiving is only about 2 1/2 weeks away, all of my various projects are going to have to be finished soon.

Hope y'all are having a good Monday!

Anyways, I hope the weather lasts throughout the weekend because I will be going to the William and Mary vs. JMU football game tomorrow! The game will be at W&M and I'm excited to be going, espcially since I've never been to William and Mary or Williamsburg. I hope the Dukes can beat them tomorrow even though we are unfortunately already out of the running to go the championship.

As far as school goes, I have just been selected for an interview with IBM next week. So once again I have another interview to go to. I feel like by the end of the year I will be a pro at interviews haha. I guess it's worth it though if it will get me a job! Also, I have a test Monday morning that I will have to study for this weekend. Guess I will be bringing my notes along with me to the football game!

Ok I'm gonna go outside and take advantage of the weather!
Have a great weekend!

Right now I'm in the Synthesis lab finishing up one of the projects I've been working on. I thought I had finished it, but unfortunately there have been a few errors with some of the documents and pictures that were scanned, so I have been rescanning some of them and putting them back into Synthesis. Its not hard to do, but just time consuming.

Yesterday my group and I had to wrap up one of the parts to a networking project we've been doing for my Local Area Networks class. The part we just finished was the Windows part of the project, and now we are starting on the Linux part of the project. I have absolutely no experience with Linux, so it will definitely be a learning experience! Thankfully the Windows part that we did is functional and we got checked off by the lab assistant so that was good news.

Class registration for the Spring 2006 semester started this week. Since I am a senior and have a lot of credits, I was able to register on Monday when registration started. This is one of the perks of being a senior because you don't have to worry about classes filling up before you can register for them. This is the LAST time I will ever register for classes here at JMU. That is so crazy to think about! However, I am loving how my schedule turned out for next semester. I only have classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and none on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays!! Once again, this is another perk of being a senior!

Well I'm gonna get back to work on all of my stuff here in the lab. Have a happy Wednesday!

There is so much going on. We will be playing football against the Richmond Spiders on Saturday. Hopefully we will win yet another home game! In addition to Homecoming this weekend, it is also Halloween on Monday, which means that most college kids will dress up sometime this weekend. It's always fun to see everyone in their costumes. There is a lot to look forward to this weekend!

As far as this week of school went, I had meetings galore like I usually do. Today I had an internship meeting and was told a little about my next project. It will involve gathering documents and making a Synthesis database, which is very similar to the Green Springs project I worked on this summer. So I will have to start working on this project very soon and find time to squeeze it in among all my many other things I have going on.

Thats about all I have to report for this week. Have a great weekend and enjoy Halloween!