Summer Recap

The second of two boards I bought this summer

With tomorrow's "Re-orienation" for 2nd year students, summer break has officially come to an end.  The basic sentiments from my last post still hold.  Happy with how the internship went, enjoyed the schedule and work/life balance, and I felt I had a fun and relaxing summer overall.

Minus5 Ice Bar in Las Vegas

One of the highlights was definitely Reich's bachelor party weekend in Vegas a couple weeks ago.  I helped plan the weekend for the 12 dudes making the trip, which was a bit of work, but everyone had a really good time.  We stayed at MGM, rented a cabana at the Wet Republic pool party, went to an ice bar, had a nice dinner at Olives, watched opening weekend of the NFL season at the Hilton Sportsbook, and had lots of other good, clean, Vegas-related fun. 

The living room of my new apartment

 The other big recent news was that I moved into my new apartment in early September which was a bigger hassle than I was anticipating.  It's a one bedroom, about a mile away from where I was living before, just west of the 405.  The big change was that its the first unfurnished place I've lived in since moving to LA, which means I had to do a lot of furniture shopping.  I scoured Craigslist and made multiple trips to Target, over the past couple weeks but I'm finally just about done furnishing and setting up the apartment (still need to find myself a dresser though).  It looks a lot better now that it's set up and the furniture I got (even the used ones) is pretty nice, but its still an old building, on a noisy street, owned by a very unresponsive landlord and maintenance dude.  My hope is that if the post-MBA job search goes well that this is the last crappy apartment I'll ever live in again.  But for student living, the place is certainly liveable, and I like having the place as my own.

I re-read my post that I wrote before the summer started to see what I was expecting out of and saw that I wrote the following: "Although my main goal for the summer is to do a really awesome job at the internship (dedicate myself, make a good impression, and learn a ton, blah blah blah), there's been a list of other things I want to do. . . Things like spending more time exercising, reading, hiking, exploring LA, going to the beach, playing guitar again, catching up on tv/movies, or even trying out some new hobbies (more surfing perhaps?)"

As these things usually are, it was a mixed bag of what actually happened compared to the goals I had set out.  I think I did a good job at the internship.  For most of the summer, I exercised almost every day after work.  I read less than one book.  I made a few (but less than I wanted to) hiking and beach trips.  I think I explored LA (tried a lot of new restaurants, went to various new attractions and events).  Saw a bunch of new movies, and caught up on one tv series (Breaking Bad).  Obviously didn't play guitar once, but did start a new hobby of surfing, which I've stuck to.

Santa Monica Pier with Allen during his visit in August

One other thing I wrote in that blog was: "One little curveball with some of my plans the rest of the way though is that almost all of my hangout crew from the past couple quarters have scattered throughout the country for internships, so I'll probably have to branch out who I spend my time with."  

This ended up being true but worked out well.  I certainly hung out with the few of my closer Anderson friends that were based in LA for the summer less frequently the past few months.  However, I started dating a girl from school early in the summer, which has more than filled what could have been a void in the social part of my summer schedule.  About 3.5 months later it's definitely been going well, and here's hoping that the busyness of the school year ahead doesn't provide too much of a distraction and that we can all find a good balance in our schedules between school, recruiting and the social side of things.

Anyways, I really do consider it a great summer overall.  If there is any regret it's that I didn't take more time off from work so that I could travel more, but otherwise I don't think there's much of anything I would have changed about the past few months.  I've been kinda sad about the summer ending and getting back in to the school grind, but school was pretty fun last year too, so I just need to get used to the more jampacked schedule again.