She will graduate this May with a degree in Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences with a minor in Child and Family Development. She has worked very hard, both in school and in rowing, and finally this year has had to drop rowing. While I know she was sad to stop rowing and being part of that team, she has taken up Ultimate Frisbee, a club sport at SDSU, and is loving it. Lots more fun, lots more time spent competing, and lots of new friends. All with the big bonus of less time required: a win-win. Our family has gone to a couple of games and we have all enjoyed watching the good natured, rough and tumble play.
When she is not in class, playing frisbee or hanging with her boyfriend, her free time is taken up with applying to Grad schools to try to get into a Speech and Language Pathology Masters program. There are far fewer Masters programs than undergrad programs, and you must have a Masters to get your license. Hard to do when the schools are so impacted, so she might be taking a gap-year instead and re-apply the next year if she doesn't make it in this first round of applications. I am guessing that taking a year off might sound a little tempting to her after 4 years of 17-18 units a semester!
Jamie had a great summer. She spent 2 months in China, the first month in Xian, where she signed up for a volunteer program that places you in China, gives you a place to stay, shows you the place you will be volunteering and that's about it....you figure out the rest! Anyway, she loved it. She lived with other young women from all over the world. Some were there for a week, some for months. She lived in an apartment building and shared a room with 3 other girls. In the mornings Jamie took the local bus for a 45 min ride to get to a "school" that cared for severely mentally handicapped children. There she was an aide in a room of kids about 7-10 years old. Due to the extreme language barrier, Jamie was pretty much on her own in figuring it out at the school, but at "home" she and her roommates all spent a lot of time together at night exploring the city. I know she came to love Xian and would really like to go back.
The next month was spent teaching English to school kids in Inner Mongolia, truly in the middle of nowhere! This program was thru a university, and most of fellow teachers were from China. Again the language barrier was tough, but she came home knowing some Mandarin, a lot about China and it's culture, and even more about the world in general. Great experiences and we are proud of her for pursuing this amazing study abroad experience. She wrote about the trip on this site: http://jamiedarlinginchina.weebly.com/blog
Here are a few choice photos from her trip and school:
Some of her fellow teachers.
One of her classes in Inner Mongolia
Exploring the Gobi dessert.
The "Gnomes", her Ultimate Frisbee team.
The next few years will be very exciting and full of major changes for our second daughter, and I know she will rise to the challenges with her typical good humor and hard work.
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