Here’s the song stuck in my head right now.

Need to pack a bag for my weekend trip going home tomorrow. I’m going to work downtown then immediately to the airport. It will be a crammed weekend for sure but it will be nice to see friends and lovely to see my mom and catch up with her because I really need to talk through my current summer plans, they are all over the place with work, school and internship options.

Tonight was also very good — I went to Northwestern with two wonderful girls from the International Studies department, we got to catch up and talk about school and career goals and life and academic interests. My conversations with INT people always start with classes and end up branching off into all of the cool things we’re interested in or involved with. I’ve never been so continually inspired as I am with my classmates in this major.

But at Northwestern we attended a Keynote presentation to this conference, by Samia Nkrumah! She’s the only daughter of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president after its 1957 independence, and Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence from European colonizers. After my intensive INT Ghana project fall quarter, this was a cool lecture to attend and Samia is a very inspiring and well-spoken woman (this being said, however, without a proper understanding of her politics as a member of Ghana’s parliament).

Being inspired by the people I meet is one of my favorite things to do. I am always up for it.