2009: Best Summer Ever?

Now that the summer is officially over, I think I can say with full confidence that this was by far one of the best summers I’ve ever had. The summer started with the completion of our senior project, The Fourmation, which led to a successful senior show. A week later I graduated! Officially done with school, forever. The day after graduation I was off to the airport with my good friends Sean and Diego for the trip of a lifetime. Less than 48hours after throwing my graduation cap in the air I was standing outside the Louvre discovering horribly translated movie posters.

After spending a few amazing days in Paris, and doing everything you would want to do in Paris, we headed out to Amsterdam. A few more days there and before I knew it I was back in the Philadelphia airport waiting for my Brazilian friend to get through US customs (apparently having a green card sucks ass.) The entire trip was a blast, but it was good to be home. Little did I know that this was just the start of my summer.

Once we got back I learned soon after that our senior project had been selected as a semi-finalist in the Adobe Design Achievement Awards. There were over 3000 entries into the contest worldwide and we were in the top 300 in the category of non-browser based design. The Philadelphia Inquirer picked up on it (with a little nudge in the right direction from my Mom) and did an awesome news article on us, and a few weeks later my face was in everyone’s living room throughout the greater Philadelphia region, literally.

So while all this was happening I was still enjoying my first summer without school in over 3 years (argh Drexel…) and had just been having fun. All my other non-Drexel friends were all finishing up with school too so I spent a lot of time home in Jersey with them and bouncing back to Philly on the weekends when everyone else was off. Anyway, fast-forward a bit to when Emily finally sends me a Facebook message telling me that after 3 years of waiting, we are going skydiving!

The back story of this starts off three years ago. As a birthday present to our friend Stevanni we were all going to go skydiving together. It was Emily’s idea, so she organized it. We all paid our ~$200 (it’s been so long I don’t even remember how much it was) and we were supposed to go the following month. Turns out it was too cloudy so it got delayed a few weeks. Than the plane we were supposed to go on caught fire, so it was pushed back another month. By this time it was simply too cold to skydive and they told us we’d have to reschedule for next summer. So we did, and next summer pretty much the exact same thing happened.


It was pushed back another year, and than finally, they called us on a Saturday morning and told us it was happening. We all loaded into the car and headed off. If I could give you just one piece of advice it would be: GO SKYDIVING! It was probably one of the greatest things I’ve ever experienced in my life.

And now for the end of the summer: The Fourmation has been selected as a finalist in the ADAA. In less than a month I will be in Beijing, China at the award ceremonies. Jared and I are both flying out there and spending 10 days exploring China. I’m freakin pumped. Once I get back there will be an entire post of it’s own dedicated to China. Wish us luck!