The excitement and anticipation have been building this week, as the submission deadline for the UTE contest came to a close and the number of applicants more than doubled. I had some pressure building in other ways this week, as the submission deadline for an article a few of my colleagues and I are writing approached. The journal is completely online, so I spent the last few days in my office until after midnight working to build webpages and embed video. This week was not that different from most other weeks during the school year, though, as I'm constantly doing 10 things at once: planning events for my graduate program, managing a journal, supervising a multimedia writing course, working on my dissertation, attending committee and reading group meetings, participating in the HASTAC technology scholars program, and those are just the things I do on campus. Theo's schedule looks similar, if not more hectic, than mine. But neither of us mind; we're graduate students. We live to multitask.
Growing up, vacations were always like this for me also. My father is a small business owner and he can never leave his office for vacation time. Instead of taking the typical summer American road trip out West, our family vacations always happened over Thanksgiving break. Because we only had a few days for each trip, we packed in as many things into our schedule as we possibly could. I remember a family vacation to New York City where we were out the door before 6am, and returned every night after midnight. We had a wonderful trip, and all of us decided that we would worry about sleeping when we got home.
Theo and I are going to do the same in Chiang Mai; we already have a list of hundreds of attractions we want to see, both in the city and the surrounding area. We want to travel to have fun, but that means spending our time experiencing as much of the city as we can, not just lying on a beach or relaxing at a health spa. Because we're so used to multitasking, you can be assured that we'll be tweeting, blogging, and vlogging the entire way. (And we've had some great practice doing this already since the contest started!) We're used to having to produce final documents (in text, image and video) with quick deadlines, and we'll be able to write a blog and upload a video even when we're traveling to the next location on our agenda. With all of the temples to see, foods to try, museums to visit, rivers to raft down, hills to trek, and people to meet, you can certainly trust two ambitious and hard working grad students to get it done.
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