School Daze

I know...I know...Several of you think I fell off the face of the earth.   It is just so hard to believe that I have been going to school for almost a month.   Meaning sometimes it feels like so much longer,  and other times it is hard to believe that a month has already gone by.   The only other time I remember having such a hard time tracking time was on my mission.  So I must be having a good time.

So what have I been doing instead of talking with all of you wonderful people.

Hanging out with some of the most awesome 120 people I know!   (The MPA program has around 120 people 60 first year and 60 second years.  There are a few MPA/JD folks in there as well but for our purposes we will say 120.

(The last girl on the right is my wonderful roommate Jenny Kellis,  the other folks are her team members,  in the MPA program we are all put onto teams for the 1st semester, a large portion of our assignments are team assignments.   So the team is important...oddly enough I don't have any pictures of my team...I will work on that)

Why are MPA people awesome?  Because we love having fun together, and we totally have skilz.
In the past month here is a list of what I have done with my MPA folks:

• Ropes Course
• Luau 
• Cook out
• Fancy Shmancy dinner with courses (that was actually with the entire BYU Graduate School Association)
• Bar-b-que with amazing entertainment (see the skilz link)
• Chips and Dips parties
• Show-and-Tell evenings with cookies
• Consumed some delicious El Salvadorian  and Thai food (not at the same time)
• Went to an awesome cabin in Spanish Fork Canyon 

Here we are up in Spanish Fork Canyon, (again I am not in the picture, I am taking the picture.)

But it has not been all fun and games.  I have been going to classes too.  And I love all of my classes.  In just one month I have become a Excel guru in training, written a policy paper, read several books, and started working with a foundation evaluating grassroots philanthropy (really interesting stuff.)

It is hard to believe I am 1/4 through the semester.  I love everything I am doing here, and I am having so much fun working with a bunch of people I love.   (This really is a running joke between my roommate and myself when ever we come back from anything  we have done with fellow MPAer's we say "I just love so and so..."  but the reality is I have yet to meet somebody in my program that I can not sit down with and have a fascinating conversation with them. ) 

And I promise I will try not to ignore you all as well.  Call me up  I will fit you into my schedule :)