Update no. 17

Hello Parents,

Well, as you already know, I am done with my EKG course and will have to venture onto working in a hospital. But first, I have to wait for them to actually give me my certificate. They said they will give it around 2 weeks after my tuition is paid in full. That payment, by the way, is due this Saturday. I hope you remembered that.

Until then, I am reviewing or the National Accreditation test for which there will be one scheduled this coming March. They said they didn’t know the actual schedule for the test but I do know who to contact in order to find out. That test is not a requirement for employment but it would be a big help as I move to New York.

My teacher did advise me to get a volunteer position before looking for actual employment. He said that I would be okay if I clocked in around 100 hours. The school that the course was in doesn’t have an official externship for EKG technicians but I know the number of the person in charge of externships. I will be contacting her on Monday. Also, there is a person in the chorus who works in UCSF and handles externships for a different department.

I still haven’t heard from SVA and I am very sad about it. I think that what I will do is just focus on getting a job and then saving up enough money to move to NY, with or without school. And I will reapply if I have to. I just want to be clear on something: I have no plans of not going to SVA. Things are just looking like they’ve been set back a little, and that’s okay.

I don’t know exactly when I’ll move but I do remember calculating that I would need around $6000 to move to New York seamlessly. But I might be able to do move there for less. So I will work here until I make that money. However, several other scenarios might occur, i.e. SVA saying that I can just start next spring. And I’ll just adjust my plans to fit that accordingly.

Now, I have become extremely busy with the chorus. Until March 6, I will be rehearsing 3 to 4 nights a week. And since I didn’t pay for this retreat and my tuxedo with cash, I will have to do some volunteer hours so that I can still stay in the chorus and not owe them a bunch of money. I’m trying to see if I can get them to clock in the hours that I spent on designing for them. Don’t worry, all of this works out very nicely and I still have time to work on EKG.

As for my own personal work, it did take a short break right after retreat and coming back in with all the stress of “what to do now” but it is coming back on track nicely and even pushing forward. I have stopped the “A Week Inspired” posts because they just were getting too tedious and for not very much return. I just don’t think that it was very relevant to anybody and so it started becoming not worth all that effort. But I still think that having some sort of journalistic effort and then translating that to design is a very beneficial endeavor. So I’m just going to figure out how to make that more relevant to my audience and re-launch it later.

I will be spending a good chunk of today and hopefully some of this weekend to figure out some schedule/workflow/timeframe as to how to progress and promote myself as a designer/artist. I'm thinking like launching a Facebook Fan Page. That way I can easily monitor my interaction with my audience. I just feel that this is even more important now that I might have to take some time to just raise money.

Thank you for the patience until I have formally made up my mind as to how to progress from here. Also, thank you for the allowance money that was sent last week. I also heard from mom that she might be sending my rent money this coming Monday so thank you in advance for that.

I’m reminding you guys again that the deadline for the last payment of the EKG course is this Saturday. It is going to be $150.

Since I am trying to clock in a lot more volunteer hours for the chorus, I have become part of a fundraising effort that happens during my rehearsals. The only thing required out of me is for me to buy a purse. It should be very cheap, I don’t imagine spending over $20 on it. But I you can please send an allowance of $50 and a little more for the purse, that would be very, very, awesome.

Thank You,
D’ken