Hey everyone!
So this past week we had my all time favorite Notre Dame tradition... 100 Nights! I've been looking forward to it since I transferred here as a sophomore. So basically, 100 Nights is a celebration of the senior class having 100 nights until graduation!!!! Technically our exact 100 Nights was Thursday the 14th, but they didn't want to mess up everyone's Valentine's plans. Anyway, the first portion of the celebration is the cocktail hour, in which students celebrate the evening with...

....Faculty (this is my fellow Criminology student Brandi and I with our advisor Professor Tuer)...

... Staff (this is my roommate Mindy and I with our amazing Athletic Director Erin Foley)...

... and fellow students! (this is a picture of my whole graduating class that was in attendance!!)

I loved the cocktail hour because it was an opportunity to leisurely see the campus faculty and staff, talk about the future, and be embraced as a future alumna (which is especially cool because so many of our faculty and staff are alumnae themselves!) At the end of the cocktail hour, our campus acapella group, Pitch Fit, sang to us as we traveled from Noyes House to Doyle Formal, where dinner was held. Along with Pitch Fit, underclassmen engaged in another old Notre Dame tradition called Lantern Chain. This year was revamped so that as we walked over to dinner the underclassmen wished us well and lit our way with sparklers! It was a lot of fun and I really liked getting to see all of my underclassmen friends! This is the best picture I could find of it, sorry it's blurry! 

So once we reached Doyle Formal, the seniors all had a big formal dinner together with some fabulous decorations: 

I loved having a chance for the seniors to celebrate graduating in 100 days on our own, together. The dinner was great and afterwards we gave out senior superlatives! That was so much fun because so many of them were spot-on (I'm looking at you Christine aka Most Talkative). My roommate Mindy and I were so excited that we were voted Dynamic Duo!!! I also got voted Most Likely To Succeed. Here's a picture of Mindy and I accepting our superlative with the presenters, our friends Janie and Shy! 

After dinner, we all went out and celebrated on the town! This year, our class took a charter bus down to Powerplant Live in Baltimore and had arranged specials at Howl at the Moon and Mex's! This is us on our way:

Overall, I had a great time and it's a night I will never forget. I've found that sometimes in the regular day-to-day repetition of going to class and practices it can be easy to forget how amazing an overall college experience has been. 100 Nights reminded me how close-knit and loving the Notre Dame community is, and how great of a time I've had here. Here's to hoping that my last 87 (yes I'm counting) days at Notre Dame are as fantastic as the past two and a half years have been! 

Hey everybody!

A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks! Here's an update on all the craziness that has been going on in my life:

1) Practicum- So the semester is off to a pretty good start. I'm taking Psychometrics, Christian Social Ethics, The Criminal Justice System, Independent Study and my Criminology Practicum. Practicum is a senior outcomes course required for several of our majors/minors that involves a 120-hour unpaid internship in your field of study. It's a great way to build upon your professional experiences and apply what you've been learning in the classroom. For my Criminology minor I am doing my practicum internship with the Maryland State Police! The people I'm working with are great and I've had a blast so far. And for anyone who's wondering, I did my practicum internship for my Psychology major at the Springfield Hospital Forensic Psychiatry Unit. So as you can tell there are internships available for a wide range of interests! One of my favorite part about Notre Dame is that they build things such as practicum into your curriculum to ensure that you're really getting the professional and networking experience to give you a leg up for after you graduate.

2) Career Fair- Speaking of professional development, my friend and fellow student ambassador, Christine, and I recently attended the Loyola Career Fair! Notre Dame has developed close relationships with several of our neighboring colleges (i.e. Loyola, Towson, Johns Hopkins etc.) and developed something called the Consortium. This means that Notre Dame students are allowed to attend most events on the neighboring campuses for free! In addition, thanks to the Consortium, students are allowed to take one class per semester at one of the neighboring schools as a part of our regular tuition! Anyway, the Loyola Career Fair was great- there were around 70 businesses there and Christine and I had a fantastic time networking and giving our resumes to potential employers!

3) Notre Dame Day- we recently had one of my favorite traditions of the year at NDM! Notre Dame Day is a day when the campus comes together to celebrate our history, our values, and the achievements of our current students/faculty/staff. The entire campus community comes together for a big luncheon and we have speeches about our history and give out several awards. Our very own Angela Baumler, Interim Director of Admissions, received the Distinguished Staff Award! No one deserves it more than her. I was honored to be asked to do the preliminary remarks and introduce this year's theme: love transforms!

So yeah that's about it for what's been going on in my life! I've got a lot of exciting stuff coming up in the next week or two, including: the start of softball season (!) 100 Nights (I'll tell you more about that later this week), and getting my (maybe) acceptance letter to graduate school!!!