The Four of US

I officially love weekends here in Cornell. I woke up at 7:00 AM instinctively, which was something I was very proud of, because I’ve never woken up on time for high school, and being here has already improved my sense of time. Nonetheless, I went back to sleep, and then I woke up at 8:00 AM again, went back to sleep again until I found myself waking up at 10:00 AM. But I only got out of bed at 10:30 PM. I called up my very good friends to meet down and get some brunch. Today Appel Commons probably had some of its better food, with some pulled meat, couscous (which is really good compared to what I know from home), and fresh salad. For the first time I had my friends, Eunice and Joanne (also my group members) join the 7 of us to eat. I had so much fun at brunch; we ended up laughing like crazy about the ways we laugh.

Joanne, Eunice and I walked back to Mary Donlon Hall because we agreed to meet up with Veronica (forth group member) at the lounge on their floor to work on our presentation. We worked from 12:00 PM to around 3:00 PM perfecting our PowerPoint slides. We made sure we got our transitions and format done correctly. Because our office hours were from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM, we knew we wouldn’t have time to eat dinner so we went back to Appel Commons at around 5:00 PM.

I would like to say that I didn’t even think about today being the Fourth of July because it’s not something that has been talked about much here at Cornell, of course except for the fact that Hotel Operations is the only program that had mandatory office hours today and that we are the only program from summer college that has class tomorrow, not just class but a formal, presentation that will be taped. Oh joy. But I am NOT being sarcastic because today had to be the most special day thus far. I would like to say that I was extremely nervous for today because I felt like we hadn’t done enough yesterday to get ready for today in order to be prepared for tomorrow. But I was wrong. We get along so well and hang out like friends, not just group members. We even ordered pizza today, but I’ll get to that later. Anyways, just so you know, I am sitting in dorm getting ready to sleep at 1:17 AM because I AM SO CONFIDENT in our wonderful group. I don’t need to stay up or pull an all-nighter or anything like that. I’ll explain more in a while.

So… office hours. Veronica reserved a room for our group to practice presenting, where a TA would listen to us and help us with anything we did wrong. We were all very nervous just to sit in the Bin Lab waiting to do that, but in the meanwhile we perfected our presentation and even ran over it twice briefly, so we wouldn’t be that nervous. We finally got our room, where we had the TA that I really liked from when we worked on our CHESS Memo. She was so helpful. It wasn’t that nerve wracking because it was only in front of her. We plugged in our USB and began presenting. I probably shouldn’t have been chewing gum the entire time or stuttered so much. But that wonderful thing is that the TA (sorry, I’m not sure of her name) recited her notes for us and told us what we needed to improve on. She actually made us realize that we put in our history information too late on in the presentation and we changed it and ran through it again. We were all nervous and faltered a bit, but we were to perfect everything.

We all walked back to our dorms and decided to meet up again at the lounge to rehearse more. First thing we did was order pizza (which was delicious). We then resumed our work and got a little corner where we huddled up and talked in front of the other 3 members. We were nervous to even do that, but we all gave each other tips and suggestions as to improve our speech, word choice, and posture. Night check came around and I went back to my floor, we had decided to meet up again downstairs, where the hoteliers actually had a room all for themselves to practice their presentation, while everyone was sleeping in preparation for a class-free day tomorrow.

I can’t even put into words how happy I am with my group and our presentation. We grabbed a little corner, and immediately jumped into our scenario, where Joanne introduced everyone and then began the powerpoint. (Oh, one more thing, the TA told us that we were about 4 minutes over the time limit, which was 8 minutes). We made sure we cut out the unnecessary information and ran through it again. I’ll describe what everyone else was doing: fooling around, chatting, sitting alone because some of their group members had meltdowns and decided to leave or go to sleep, and being boisterous. We constantly had people come up to us, complain about their group and tell us how much they were jealous that we all got along well. It made me feel so good, as well as the rest of the group members; we were actually making progress. I want to say that we rehearsed our presentation at least 10 times, timing ourselves and telling others where they could improve. We were really connecting and making sure we had everything down. I am really excited for tomorrow, a little nervous at the same time, and I can honestly say that no matter what happens, I am really proud of my group and wish us the best!