Hello again. Wow, this makes two posts in a month, let’s see if I can average that shall we?
It’s been over a year since I graduated from the University of Minnesota. That year went so incredibly fast it’s amazing. It’s funny how you work so hard to get through elementary school middle school high school and then college. Always working towards a singular goal: starting your real adult life. And then when it gets here you don’t know what to do it because the goals are so much more hazy.
I’m sure I’m supposed to have goals now. Don’t know what they are though. Kind of just focusing on living my life. So instead of goal planning in this post, why not just focus on the things that have happened in the last year whether they are goals or not? Here is a list of things I have accomplished in the last year without having planned a single one of them.
- I got a patent written up and filed. Hopefully more to come but we shall see.
- I broke up with my boyfriend and now I’m living alone which actually is pretty awesome. I love not having to clean up after anyone but myself.
- I started working on an open source project that turned out to be one of the most awesome and rewarding things I’ve ever done.
- I got my car paid off. Woo no car payment!
- I started paying on my student loans and have made double payments every time. I’m still in a lot of debt but I’m making good progress which I guess is what counts.
- I traveled to a bunch of new States. I went to Tennessee and North Carolina and Colorado and Texas. All for work stuff but still.
- I joined the Society of Women Engineers and went to their National Conference.
- I started going to dubstep shows and went to my first three day EDM Music Festival.
- I spoke at the Austin OpenStack Summit. I did 2 talks to at least a hundred people both times. That’s a lot of people. More than I’ve ever spoken to before anyway.
- I started building a network of co-workers and friends that literally spans the continent and I’m working on spanning the globe. I now have friends in California and Colorado and North Carolina. I have a friend in Israel as well.
- I started hanging out with one of my college professors and she lives in the same apartment building as me now with her husband. Probably among one of the coolest people I know.
- I interviewed at 3 different companies and ended up coming out of it with a new job that I am more excited about than any other project I’ve been given to work on.
- I also started a personal website and blog.
For not having had any real goals in this last year, I’d say I’ve accomplished an awful lot. And yeah I can see how someone would look at that list and be like oh well she just happened to be given all of those awesome opportunities and I’m not that lucky so I can’t. The thing is though I wasn’t handed any of those things. None of that stuff happened by accident. I had to step outside my comfort zone think outside the box and really stretch and work hard to do every one of those things. And you can do it too, so there.
–Kendall