This is the End

Hey everybody!  Welcome to my final post of the school year!  It’s already the end of the semester somehow.  Finals are next week and everybody is stressin’ out.  Luckily I’ve managed to not be too stressed. Yes I have two finals and two final projects, but the projects are group ones. 

My Research Methods class performed our Colerain Township survey this month.  We only received a little over 100 responses, which is on the lower end of our goal, we could still be proud of ourselves.  We now know how to perform a full scale telephone survey, which will probably be a very useful skill for later classes (especially Capstone).  17 of us met one night to write our final paper, which turned out really well surprisingly.  I was chosen to edit the paper and write up the summary on the findings of the survey (I was the one who entered them into Excel).  I’m still working on finishing it up for the deadline on Monday, the day of our final, but I think it’s gonna be a great paper despite being a little bit of a Frankenstein’s monster.

My Public Budgeting course has turned out pretty well too.  We have a group project where we have to create a fake budget for a city department.  Me being the TV-obsessed person that I am really wanted to do a mock budget for the Parks and Recreation Department of Pawnee, Indiana form the show “Parks and Rec.”  Myself and two classmates (one of whom is a huge fan of the show too) agreed to do it and the project has turned out really well.  We tried to incorporate things from the show into our project, such as information about the eccentric citizens and their obesity problems.  We present tonight, and I’m looking forward to it.

Also this month I went to Chicago with Dr. Lambert for the MPSA conference!  I was able to listen to some interesting panels and discussions.  I also explored the city a bit more.  I made to Millennium Park and the Bean, the Chicago Art Institute, and Navy Pier (no deep-dish pizza though this time unfortunately).  Dr. Lambert and I presented our paper and received some good feedback from the audience and our fellow panelists. 

This has been a fun foray into the blogosphere and I hope I was able to entertain you guys a little bit while sharing with you my experiences as a first year graduate student/assistant. I’ll be back in the fall for year 2, so don’t worry guys you’ll be hearing more from me.

Thanks so much!

Kyle