By 2004, my days and nights were packed with 40 hours of work, another 20 for school, and socializing with some friends in the grad program when I could. One of the strange aspects of the very obscure graduate program at Ithaca was that of the 30 or so students enrolled, about a third were American and the rest international: Greece, France, Norway, Bulgaria, Taiwan, China, India, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia. That worldliness of the overall experience added a lot of value to what could have been a very dry study in corporate communications.
That spring marked two years at my job. It was still enjoyable even if it wasn't a great fit. More importantly, I was looking at a longer graduate experience than I had hoped, being on the part-time track. What most students would do in 1.5-2 years full-time, I was looking at about 3 years part-time, with the last semester or two becoming very taxing between work and an in-depth senior capstone project. So I flipped it, making the second year of school full-time, and turning my full-time job into a part-time one.
Like the year before it, 2004 was also fairly unremarkable. I started dating a girl in the fall. Between my PC and my Xbox, I got back into gaming again like I did when I was a teenager. By the years end, with only one full-time semester left in graduate school, there was another crossroads on my horizon. After what would be seven years in Ithaca come graduation in May, one thing I knew for sure was that it was time to go. All of my closer friends from the grad program graduated that December after only three semesters and a summer and only one was staying in town. Beyond the idea of leaving, I had zero clue what to do my life. I was itchy, but I didn't know what I was itchy for.
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