Who is Your Roommate?

Roommates are a fantastic college experience, whether your friendship with them ends up working out or not. If I recall, it's about time to be getting your rooming information in the mail. This is an exciting time! With the popularity of social media, as soon as you get your rooming information in the mail, you can go on Facebook to learn more about your roommate(s). I would highly recommend getting to know your roommate(s) before you arrive at school in the fall. It's good to learn a little bit about each other so that you can be friendly before you have to live together. Good questions to ask are if the other person is a morning or night person, what time they go to bed, if they're a light sleeper or not, and what their study habits are. If you're planning on rooming with a good friend of yours, always be advised that ALL of the college advice books tell you not to do this. Living with someone gives a different perspective on your relationship with them.

Let's say you are planning on rooming with a good friend or two. It's a natural decision because you know them and are comfortable hanging out with them. You then don't have to worry about not knowing your roommate(s) prior to living together. However, things you may not have known about your best friend:

-Maybe they're a loud snorer and it makes it impossible for you to sleep at night.
-Maybe they refuse to clean or take out the trash.
-Maybe they spend 3 hours in the bathroom each day.
-Maybe they borrow your clothes or shoes without asking.
-Maybe they want their boyfriend or girlfriend to stay over all the time.

The point is, a lot of things can go wrong with roommates whether or not you are best friends and it's always best to keep things civil. Go into each rooming year with some idea of who the person is. Take a genuine interest in them and that will lead to civility if not a new friendship. It's always good to compare what you're planning on bringing to your room in the fall so that roommates don't end up with duplicates. It's also good to come up with a sort of Roommate Agreement or Roommate Contract. This is  something you and your roommate(s) can do between yourselves to determine what kinds of things will and won't be tolerated as you live together. Things to include may be a trash schedule or a bathroom cleaning schedule, noise conditions, and even bedtime routines. As long as everyone can agree on what goes into this contract, everyone should be able to follow it and maintain a happy rooming situation. If anything goes awry from this contract, your Resident Assistant can help you sort things out. Most times rooming disputes are fairly easy to handle. If your RA intervenes but it does not help, you can go to Resident Life and they will help you. Sometimes, if a more serious issue is the heart of the roommate problem, the college counselors will be brought in to help you sort through things. If the issue is completely unable to be resolved, you may receive a new roommate or be moved to a new room. La Roche is really good about roommate situations and trying to resolve them to the benefit of everyone involved. The majority of the time, you really do become good friends with your roommates. So good luck with your new roomies this fall!

Getting Involved

Getting involved is an important thing to do while you're in college. La Roche has many different clubs and activities to help you be involved. La Roche also makes it pretty easy to start your own club based on your own interests. It's almost impossible to get through college at La Roche without being involved in at least one thing.

After college and even during the summers it's harder to stay involved. While you can stay inside all day and play video games, it's not advised. When you have a full-time job, you very well may come home from work and be absolutely exhausted. You might be very inclined to sit down and watch tv all evening after you get home. I'm in this predicament right now. I hate to waste time but at the same time, I'm worn out at the end of a long day. This makes me realize that I need to get involved. There are opportunities everywhere...it's just a matter of finding them. My local library has a program called Chicks With Sticks which is a knitting group. Other places to look for social opportunities are churches, hospitals, soup kitchens, humane societies, nursing homes, girl or boy scouting, Habitat for Humanity and community centers. It can be very rewarding to be involved and it also gives you something to do.

Maintaining Relationships

Maintaining relationships of any kind in college and after college can be difficult. With technology today, you would think it would make things easier: FaceTime with your mom, texting your boyfriend, Facebooking your best friend...the list goes on. However, technology makes things harder for a lot of people. Mom won't be able to give you a hug on a bad day. You will miss your boyfriend's voice. You'll miss those silly moments with your best friend. It's important to manage your time well so that you can spend time with those people that mean the most to you and not get behind on school work. College is about working hard to ensure a happy, successful future, but it's also about having fun with the people that mean the most to you.

Just when you settled into a comfortable routine of maintaining relationships from home, you're about ready to graduate. After graduating, you miss the people you became friends with at school. It's important to keep in touch with professors that helped you throughout school. As a recent graduate from La Roche, there are several professors I want to keep in contact with. One of the best ways to do this is by email since I live about 45 minutes away from school. There are several professors that are curious about what I'm up to since I was lucky enough to find a job right before I graduated. It also pays to keep in touch with professors if you're having a hard time finding a job. This is especially applicable with majors that rely on networking to get jobs, such as graphic design. Many of my professors started to recommend people in my graduating class for jobs in the spring semester. Of course, it's not just professors that you want to keep in touch with from college. I have both a friend and a boyfriend an hour or so away from where I live, in opposite directions. Worse yet, they have opposite work schedules.

Being busy is a thing that happens naturally and when you get busy, people tend to drift apart. There is such a thing as balance and it's important to use college to start to find it before you get even busier upon graduation. Remember to keep in touch!!

A New Kind of Time Management

Everyone always says you need to learn the skill of time management (if you haven't already mastered it) by the time you get to college and that if you haven't learned it already, college is the perfect time to do so. Since graduating, I'm finding it more important than ever before to be good at managing my time. The bad part is...I'm not doing so well at it. In college, you have breaks between classes, evenings, when you're supposed to be sleeping, weekends, and the morning before class to get any school work done that you put off or haven't gotten done. If you've had a job during college, you're probably getting pretty darn good at managing your time.

I can honestly say since graduating, it's harder than ever to manage my time. I knew when I graduated that I had a job using my degree, but I wasn't really prepared for what that meant. I was definitely used to being busy and cramming things that needed done into the small time frames I had during the school year. I had an internship and was taking summer classes in addition to doing 10 hours of work study a week during the summer '10 semester. I barely managed that. My La Roche days were Monday and Wednesday from 7:30 to 5 and it was a 45 minute commute from home (each way). My internship days were Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 8:30 to 5:30 or 6 with a commute varying from 40 minutes to almost 2 hours sometimes each way. In addition, I had massive amounts of homework. There's something to be said for finding ways to get things done when you're busy. All through college I had worked hard to keep myself busy and constantly learning. Thus, I ended up having very little free time. Now that I work Monday through Friday, 8-5 with only a half hour commute, I have from 6pm-11pm free as well as the entirety of the weekend. Of course, I have things I need to do like cleaning my room and other small organizational tasks. I have things I want to do like reading and teaching myself more things that will help me keep on top of new happenings in my industry (graphic design). There are also the things I just want to do for fun like play Super Mario Brothers for Wii, hang out with my friends from college, and take walks with my dog. I'm not sure why, but it feels like work lasts all day. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE my job, but it does take away all my daylight hours during the day. I also know I need to go to bed by 12 at the absolute latest if I'm going to be worth anything the next day at work (especially because it's a creative job, which can be mentally taxing at times). Unfortunately, I'm still at the point where I wake up in time to get ready for work and not do anything else, leave for work, work till 5, come home, eat dinner, and sit around all evening. If I try to meet up with people after work, even if I get home at a decent hour, I'm exhausted when I get home and into the next day. As of right now, weekends are spent out and about at least half the time because it's summer and there are many activities to do. As a result, I have a bunch of small things I need to catch up on and I never end up leaving time for them! I would say time management is hands down the biggest adjustment from college to the real world. Well...that and maintaining relationships and friends from college, which I will get into more next week.

Entering the Real World

Since graduating on May 7, I can say for a fact that I wouldn't be where I am today without having attended La Roche College. At the portfolio show for Graphic and Interior Design seniors, I was approached by several professionals. One of these professionals contacted me for an interview. The interview went very well, thanks to the advanced and unique opportunities that I sought out through my education at La Roche and was able to talk about in my interview. Because of my unique experiences, I ended up being offered a position as a Graphic Designer at Media Frogg Marketing and Communications in Zelienople before I graduated. I started working at Media Frogg on May 16, 2011 and I can honestly say I enjoy going to work every day. I'm doing what I love and working with great people.

Two important lessons:

-If you want to learn about something specific that's not covered, find out more information and take an independent study with a professor who's willing to learn about the same thing. It will definitely put you ahead in your chosen career field and La Roche makes it very easy.

-Give your all in an interview. Let the interviewer know that you're passionate about the job and don't be afraid to stick your neck out for it (without being obnoxious). Interviewers want to know that they're hiring someone who really wants to be there with the intention of making an investment in their company.

Portfolio Show Follow-Up

The Graphic and Interior Design Portfolio Show was held April 13 at the Steel Building in Pittsburgh. Both of these majors are required to make a portfolio of their work before graduation. These portfolios are then taken to interviews and shown as a demonstration of skills. Many professionals from both disciplines are invited to the portfolio show. The professors hope that this show will be a good opportunity for networking and potential jobs.


I think we all worked very hard to get to the milestone of the portfolio show. It was a long road of choosing our best works and revising them to make them even better. It meant countless dollars spent, countless nights staying up late, and countless cups of coffee. In the end though, I can say it definitely paid off. The portfolio show was a great success and there were several potential employers there to look at our books. All the students were set up with half of a long table covered with a white tablecloth. I put out my portfolio book, a logo book, my letterhead and business cards, a booklet with some samples of work in for potential employers to take, and a few hard copies of projects I had done. Friends and family as well as prospective students are invited to this capstone event for the seniors. I had two prospective students stop by my table and admire my book and ask questions about the project. It was really nice to see the students that eager to learn about the program that they would come to this event. I think that's one of the great things about the Graphic Design major specifically, is that there are several events and presentations that really summarize what the program is all about. These are fantastic things for prospective students to see: graphic design graduates succeeding, even before graduation. At the portfolio show there are also leadership awards presented to the most successful of the graduating classes for both graphic and interior design, which is a big honor. This year, Andrew Graham and Mark Cancilla got the leadership award for graphic design. All in all, the event was very nice, the food was good, and it even led to a few job possibilities!


Now for graduation, only a mere 11 days away...

Oh! The Places You'll Go!

Four years ago, I had no idea how the title of this Dr. Seuss book was going to describe my time at La Roche as a graphic design major! In a figurative sense, I’ve grown immensely as a person and as a designer. In a literal sense, graphic design at La Roche has introduced me to many new places.


First, I learned about places to get supplies. I wrote about many of these a few weeks ago. In addition to the physical stores, I learned how smart it was to sign up for mailing lists. Borders, JoAnn Fabrics, and Michaels routinely send you useful coupons, often as much as 40% off an item. Also, if you’re going to buy food, it’s smart to have a Giant Eagle advantage card or have a duplicate of your parents’ card. It not only gives you sale prices, but you also earn fuel perks, a discount on gasoline at Get Go stations. If you have a car, this saves you money on your gas. If you don’t have a car, your parents will appreciate that you save them a bit of money. Buying gas at Get Go also gives you more discounts on food at Giant Eagle. 


Second, certain graphic design projects led me to do research at various places. A redesign of Primanti Brother’s website led to dinner at the Cranberry location so that I could absorb the atmosphere and take some photographs. This one was great, as I’d always wanted to eat at Primanti’s! Another project on produce signage took me to Trader Joe’s, Right by Nature, and Whole Foods in Pittsburgh. As I’m a foodie by nature, this was a great excursion. Along those lines, a cupcake website design led me to CoCo’s Cupcakes in Shadyside (now closed) and Dozen Cupcakes in Lawrenceville and Oakland. A catalog of fly fishing reels took me across Pittsburgh to International Angler in the Robinson area, and later to the Allegheny Sport, Travel and Outdoor Show at the Monroeville Convention Center. For a photography assignment, I went to Mount Washington for an evening. Different assignments took me to Pittsburgh’s South Side, which was also where I completed an internship. 




These adventures have had other benefits as well. I’ve learned my way around Pittsburgh quite well. I’ve navigated major highways, tunnels, narrow one-way streets and parking garage ramps. Though maps and GPS aren’t a bad idea, I find my way around pretty well without them after four years. I’ve even proven my ability to change a tire in the rain!




Graphic design research may take place in the library or on the internet, but the best research is done out in the real world!









Groovy Pop Culture Emporium, Carson Street



stairs that have a street sign, South Side



South Side Local Development Company mural



cupcakes from CoCo's