Plans

I realize I haven't written here for a long time (nearly a year...) so I should probably update my plans.
I've completely changed my major in college. I went from hoping to get into the College of Music here at MSU to being a German major. I'm taking German, with 2 cognates: Polish and mid/eastern European history. What do I expect to gain out of taking this? At first I didn't know. But I began looking around for career options and noticed that the UN was coming to MSU, and more importantly, they wanted to speak with students of less commonly taught languges (Polish). So I went, and I learned a lot. First, it is REALLY competitive to get a job with the UN (duh), second, they really like for you to have 2 UN languages + a 3rd language under your belt, third it's going to take a lot of international work experience and grad school to get a job with them. A few UN languages are English, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. German and Polish are not UN languages. :(
So then I started planning to change from Polish to Russian, but a few days ago I figured that my schedule was going to be already so jam packed that I need to just fill my cognate requirement with Polish and worry about Russian in graduate school. Also, Russian and Polish are very similar (when spoken). My aunt speaks Russian and she watched one of my Polish films and she could understand quite a bit of it! So my Polish studies, although it will only be for 3 semesters, will help me to eventually learn Russian.
I'm planning to study abroad for a year in my senior year. It's going to be a costly endeavor, but I really need the experience of living abroad, immersed in the language, to really get a grip on it. The program MSU currently offers is the academic year in Freiburg. I'm going to see if I can live off campus in an apartment so my boyfriend Jesse can come with me as well and stay with me. He has family over in Denmark so hopefully we are going to go visit them as well. And then go to Norway where the vikings are!! :D
I've been planning my schedule out, and there's no way around it: I'm going to have to spend at least 1 semester as a 5th year senior. :( But that's ok because originally I wanted to be in music education, which is a 5 year program.

Those are my long term goals. As far as short term, well. I'd really like to paint my apartment. As long as I paint it with the colors that the apartment company has listed, I won't have to paint over it when I move out. The apartment that my boyfriend and I are going to move into in July/August we cannot paint. Even if we paint over it when we move out. Bummer. But! it's over 900 sq feet and it has a balcony and a pool and it is outside of East Lansing so we will really enjoy the space and atmosphere of this new apartment. I'm really looking forward to it.