We interrupt our regularly scheduled journaling to direct you to a photojournal of the day's big event: Campus in Flames (by the same author). An unfinished campus building caught fire, burning most impressively, and your intrepid photojournalist (i.e. "person with camera") was there! Apologies to any readers on dial-up: the images are all about 400k. I did put them on individual pages, so that may help.
In other news, my internship may have gone up in smoke yet again. The third slot developed "funding problems" as well. We are now on the fourth, last chance slot and my professor is getting suspicious, especially since other students are not having similar problems, although he's sure this must be due to the recent reorganization of the agency. You know, simple bad luck.
He went ahead and submitted my resume to the fourth project, on which he is actually working, whereupon this researcher expressed some concern that I am the president of a company.
Aha! "It's a one-person company," I say. "I don't have any employees, just two fat cats. Do they think I'm going to blow off the internship to attend to the company? I thought that having my own business would show that I'm responsible and hard-working."
"Well, I told him that [you wouldn't]." My professor doesn't think he can get any grant money for the summer, but he tells me that if he could, he'd sponsor the internship for me. "You shouldn't be working at McDonald's this summer."
This is so infuriating. An idiot could see from my academic record what priority I give this engineering program. It's possible they're scared of an intern who could truthfully say, "I know something you don't know. I can do stuff you can't do!" Not that I'd rub it in or anything, I mean really, because if I were all-knowing I wouldn't be in school, would I?
When I tell him all this, Oz says, "They must have really short 'self-esteems' there at [name of government agency withheld]."
Maybe it's time to start hitting up the private sector.
345 words | March 26, 2004 09:37 PM | Ivory tower