Hi! I’m sorry I haven’t blogged in a really long time, last semester was hectic and every time I sat down to try to write about it all I couldn’t figure out what to write! Right now it’s the second week of the second semester of my second year, which is exciting. I have a lot of things to update you on which I’ll do my best to put in this blog post but it’s likely I’ll end up scattering some of the things over several posts.

Right before the academic year started I spent almost all week helping out with registration, I was glad to see a couple of latino students, hopefully some of them will eventually decide to join us and blog here! During that same week I was finally offered a job after applying for every job I could find nonstop for months. I kicked off the first week of classes and my new job feeling like nothing could get in the way of me having the most amazing semester and finally not having to worry about jobs but I was about to find out how wrong I was. By the end of that first week the sleep deprivation was killing me (I was working as a cleaning assistant at the university from 5am to 8am) and I wasn’t sure if I was going to manage to do taekwondo on top of it all because the training times are quite late. I did make it to the first training of the semester and I was really happy to go, plus it was my first time at the sports park which made me really regret not signing up to one of the sports clubs or the gym as soon as I became a student at Surrey, the amount of things you can do there is huge and so is the size of it. Unfortunately that day would come to an unpleasant end, me injuring my knee and the elevator in my building being broken (this year I’m living on campus again, but this time I’m at international house). The next day involved a trip to the ER (called A&E here which is short for accidents and emergencies) and being put on crutches and the waitlist for the fracture clinic. This sadly meant I couldn’t do either taekwondo or my job from then on, and I spent most of the rest of the year on crutches and later on attending physical therapy. In addition to that, I’ve also been having issues with my vision and I thought it would all be resolved with an appointment to get my prescription checked and new glasses but this wasn’t the case and I was sent to a specialist clinic at the royal surrey. The wait was really long (as of right now I still haven’t gotten an answer about what’s wrong with my eyes but I did have some tests done) which was another source of stress and difficulties for me during last semester. Midterms started creeping up on me and it felt as if I was always at doctor’s appointments instead of university and I spent the latter half of the semester struggling to catch up. Luckily, things started looking much better in January. I applied for some jobs and internships for the summer as well as one for the spring and I was given an interview for the spring one. I also finally managed to start attending taekwondo training and I’m really enjoying it, if all goes well I’ll be competing in the nationals in a few weeks (and I’ll definitely blog about it). I also started working with widening participation in addition to the international team which I’m really really enjoying and is something that I want to continue doing while I’m at surrey and post graduation. In the time I’ve been working with WP I’ve helped with a careers fair, language subject taster, year 8 week which is a whole week dedicated to showing 12 year olds how university is like, online mentoring and maths classes on Saturday morning which remind me of a similar program I attended when I was still in Guatemala. I recently heard back about the spring internship and I’m proud to say that I’ll be doing a 10 day internship at Goldman Sachs this April (which I’m not sure if I can blog about, but I will if I can). Overall this semester is looking less hectic than last (so hopefully it stays that way because last semester was definitely the worst I’ve had so far) and I’m really excited about the rest of it (except next week because grades are released and I have a feeling I didn’t do well at all, but I guess we’ll see)