It’s Almost Been a Year
2014 November 4
In 6 days, November 9 will mark the anniversary of my return to the US. In fact, this will be the first time I’ve been in the states for a consecutive year since December of 2012. I had a lot of opportunities to travel in a short amount of time. Belize/Guatemala, Australia, then Argentina (and Uruguay) in the course of one year. Now the furthest I’ve been from the Omaha/Sioux City area since last year has been the Chicago Alpha Kappa Psi business trip I took last February. Understandably, I haven’t updated my travel blog in a while since there isn’t a lot to update, but here I am, updating it anyway. (I just read my last blog post and, haha, I said I wouldn’t wait 5 months between each post).
Wolfram Alpha
If you go to Wolfram Alpha Facebook Report, it’s pretty interesting. It shows you basic data and trends about what you do on Facebook, such as the times of the week you are most likely to be logged in, what words you use the most, male/female ratio of your friends, friend relationship status breakdown (pie chart showing percent of single, married, engaged), age distribution, friend networks, etc. (and it’s all about you, what’s more interesting than that?) What does this have to do with my travel blog, titled “Don’t Cry for Me, USA”? Well calm down and I’ll tell you.
Running the report after almost a full year away from the country, there is still plenty of influence that shows up in almost all sections of the report. My most commonly said words include “Argentina”, “travel”, and “abroad”:
My most liked post (I didn’t know my friends were all so sarcastic):
Friend map:
Friend distribution (2nd place Argentina):
And, in my opinion, the most interesting part. The friend network visualization (I added the boxes and text in myself after seeing which friends are mapped out where):
It groups my friends by how they are connected to my other friends, and the sizes are pretty well proportional to how much time I spent where. Sioux City/East High has the largest volume, since I grew up there from 4th grade to high school graduation. Creighton/Omaha has less people but it is a lot more dense since the people I know here are usually more well-connected to each other in a tight-knit university community. Argentina can be split into a couple sub-categories, the US friends I met in el país (more densely grouped together in the center) non-US, non-Argentine friends I met allá (mostly European, also in the center but a little more spread out), and actual Argentine people, about the same volume of the other sub-categories but spread out along the fringes of that network. Then there are the people I met at World MUN, Melbourne and the random people that have no or almost no mutual friends to me. The most interesting groups are probably the inbetweeners. There were a couple of people I randomly met in Argentina who happened to know some people that go to Creighton, and there are of course the Sioux Cityers who also go to my university. I think it’s really cool how a computer program can know this about me, not by looking up where they live geographically, but by who is connected to whom.
I am going to make it a goal to see someone that I met in Argentina before another year passes by, because so far I have seen none and it is just such a bummer. It’s also a little tough when you’re the only Midwesterner that was in the AIFS group while the other 4 are situated on the East Coast. Thanks to Facebook, I know that Morgan and Amy have met up at least once and I’m pretty sure Crystal and Kristen have too. Almost, almost I saw Becky when she almost came to Omaha for a concert but got sick before she could come. The almost again when I visited Kansas City last July (but I planned kind of poorly and didn’t let her know until I was actually in Kansas City).
Current Future Plans
I can’t wait to travel again. The next time I will be a significant distant away is when I visit Chicago again in 3 weeks for American Model United Nation. This will probably be the last MUN I go to. Next semester, I will most likely not be going to World MUN in Seoul, but at least it’s not for any super-sad reason. Instead during that time, I will be in San Francisco for a class I am enrolled in next semester. Did I mention that I’m still interning with Yahoo? (Fun fact: Did you know that Yahoo owns Tumblr?) It will be not only an exciting travel opportunity, but a great opportunity to possibly network for my future. After this internship, and a final major switch (to Business Intelligence and Analytics instead of International Business), I finally know what kind of industry I would like to work in when I’m older, and it feels good to finally know where I think I can belong and succeed.
On that note, I think I will be starting a professional blog where I document things that are going on with work (nothing confidential of course, sorry Google), with my professional fraternity, anything that might be of interest to developing my future self such as this weekend’s case competition or an event called 3 Day Startup in which I will be participating. And if that interests you (aka Mom, Grandma, etc) feel free to follow it when I get it up and running.
Until next time, no llores para mi.