That photo to the left adequately describes how I'm feeling right now. How, you ask? Well, I feel burned out. Tired. Overworked. I need a vacation.

It's nearly midterms, which means every student at CUC is feeling the allure of midterm break, Thanksgiving and Christmas loom ever so much closer than before. I, in particular, can't wait until Christmas break. My family will be spending the holidays in a condo in Florida. My boyfriend--now fiance--will also be coming with us, and he's never been to any of the Disney amusement parks. Shocking, I know, how someone could live nearly 25 years without meeting Mickey firsthand.

Well, the past few days have been a blur. I've had music rehearsals (there's an orchestra concert this weekend), papers due and, of course, I had to completely upload, re-vamp and prepare the old Columbia Journal website for the new content.

I'm interim editor of CUC's newspaper right now--the Columbia Journal. My sponsor, Mitch Tropin, and I decided that it was in the best interest of the paper to put it online for now while we re-work some logistics with the print version.

I'm excited about the articles we have right now, and I hope that we can entice more people to write as we are now paying per word for freelance writers. Staff writers get paid more. Money is always a big motivation!

Our next task with the CJ will be to change the look-and-feel (i.e. "the way a website looks). It's a little dated, yes, but we just needed a template right now to get our content online. Luckily, this template was completely at our disposal, and we didn't have to do a huge amount of site editing, which is great. I just needed somewhere to unload these articles and photos!

I hope that the students here at CUC will embrace an online version with the same enthusiasm I have. I'm looking forward to us having the ability to update at-will, instead of having to wait for print turnaround and whatnot.

But, until then, I'm exhausted! I'm trying to stay grounded in the present right now and not look too far ahead. I've found that there's nothing more stressful than worrying about the next day, when you haven't even finished up the one you are living in.

So, that's my nugget of advice for today. Check out the CJ and let me know what you think!

E-mail me at columbiajournaleditor@gmail.com or cj@cuc.edu.

Labels: Jaclyn Wile, student blog