my weekend

Figured I would write a little to tell how my RSA workshop went.

We flew out on Thursday and spent the evening traveling. Got to Harrisburg airport and then rented a car and drove to State College, PA. Got there about 1 am local time.

On Friday morning, we were able to sleep until we wanted to wake up (which was early, but still not an alarm clock) and then we went into the little town. We hit a local coffee shop and then walked around the town just looking before we headed to the workshop registration.

Finished registration and ate a lunch with all the participants present. Keynote speech much less boring than I anticipated. Basically it was this awesome linguistics scholar saying that rhetoric is applicable to a ton of fields, kind of almost like she was throwing a middle finger to those who say otherwise.

Immediately after the workshop, we were to report to our workshop classrooms, which we were told (just at the lunch, not any time before) was a "hike". I walked back to the parking garage to grab my laptop and then took off on a grand trek across Penn State. It was MISERABLE. I was dressed the way I dressed for work—jeans, heels, a regular top. I had to walk literally like a mile and a half in my heels, in the BLAZING HEAT. By the time I got to the building, I could smell myself. I was embarrassingly sweaty and also very angry and wanted to just say, screw it, and go back to the hotel and take a nap.

Thankfully, the workshop itself wasn't bad at all. The first day was basically some general introduction to the topic. I'm not going to go into a bunch of detail, but the point of the workshop was to study communication among members of a group doing a project to pinpoint problems and find solutions to streamline the communication or make it more efficient and less problematic. The professors who ran it were excellent… They were all young and dynamic and clearly passionate about the work, which always rubs off. By the time I left, I really could have immediately ran off to do a similar project. Too bad it's totally not feasible with my life. If anyone has a rich uncle who dies and wants to pay for me to do the PhD program online through Texas Tech, I'll take it!

Friday night we went to TGIF and had some margaritas and food, which was very relaxing and tons of fun.

We woke up Saturday and had workshops all day. For lunch we went to a local pizza/salad/sub place, which was good. The workshop went well, although this was the day that I had more trouble with. I'm not good with graphic organization of info, which was essentially the entire research method. Still, it was handy and interesting. We went to get some Penn State t-shirts on the way home. That night the RSA had a dinner outside, so we hit that briefly to make an appearance and then went to a local bar. They had a sort of street fair with an excellent band playing just outside, so we had a good time for a little while and then left. We stopped and got some ice cream and then just wandered the streets and chatted until we went back to the hotel.

Sunday morning was the workshop wrap up. We ate at a local sandwich shop and then took off for the airport. We were traveling from around noon Eastern time until midnight Mountain time. Miserable. Got home at around one in the morning.

The university there was beautiful, and the cool New England houses ruled, but it was clearly way too expensive for me to ever consider living there. The campus was awesome.