Author Archives: kwiens

Business Cards

Hello Readers!

I hope you have had a fantastic weekend!  Today was a stormy day in Vancouver which I spent snuggled up in bed with my computer watching bad TV and drinking tea.  It was amazing.  I had big plans to go into the lab to get ahead on my work for the week, but obviously that didn’t end up happening and that’s ok.  I found this past week exhausting, so it was great to take a day completely off.

On Saturday I attended Creating Connections 2.0 which AJung discussed in an earlier blog post and it was fantastic!  It was an all day conference geared towards women students and professionals in science and engineering.  The day was very interactive and the style of the individual events varied throughout the day which I found really helped keep my energy level up.  Public speaking isn’t one of my favourite things to do, so I attended all of the public speaking/networking workshop sessions and left with an “elevator pitch” and lots of tips on how to engage an audience and make effective presentations which will hopefully help.  If you are/will be at UBC next year, I recommend looking into attending.

One thing that became clear in meeting so many new people there was that I really need to make some business cards.  Writing my contact information on scraps of paper doesn’t really leave the most professional impression, so for the past couple of hours I have been googling local printing companies and think I have settled on the following design from The Letter Shop:

Making a business card is a tricky thing!  I want it to look professional and to “fit in” with the style the cards I’ve seen from people working in industry, but I also want it to stand out enough to not get lost in a pile of similar, or worse, more interesting looking cards.

I decided to essentially copy my name and address section from my resume so the styles of the two match and become my “brand” design.  I’m not sure if it is a mistake to not have any color on the card and may change the stripe in the centre to a green gradient instead of grey, but I have the same stripe on my resume and really like the idea of them matching!  I’ll sleep on it anyway.

I would love to hear what you think of it, and what you think makes a really great business card!

Tightwad Grad Student: Make a Frappuccino for $0.32!

Hello readers!

I bought a MonerySense magazine (Sept/Oct 2011) the other day, and they had an exciting recipe to make a Frappuccino for only $0.32 (see pg. 11)!

2/3 cup double-strength Stabucks Pile Place Blend coffee, cold ($0.15)
1/2 cup 2% milk ($0.10)
2 tbsp sugar ($0.05)
1 1/2 cup ice ($0.00)
Pinch of xanthan gum ($0.02)

Brew coffee and combine in a blender! Yum! 😀

Healthy Grad Student: 200 Sit-ups and Squats!

Hello readers!

I am back from a week off spent in Calgary visiting the BF and I feel a renewed sense of enthusiasm for just kind of life in general!  Hence I have decided to try my hand at a few of the trendy fitness programs I seem to be late to the game knowing about.  Specifically I am going to do the 200 squat and modified 200 sit-up programs!

Both of these programs can be found at these sites:
http://www.twohundredsquats.com/
http://www.twohundredsitups.com/

So the point of these programs is to slowly build you up to be able to do said 200 of these exercises all in one shot after 6 weeks of following the plan.  You are supposed to start the programs by doing an initial diagnostic test to figure out which of the three ‘categories’ you fitness you currently fit in (worst, mid, best).  I, of course, made the assumption that of course I am the best!…..and I am feeling it a bit today 🙂

Since I have mild scoliosis, I don’t really think doing 200 would-be-crooked sit-ups would be particularly good for my back, so I am going to do leg lifts (the thing where you lay on your back and lift your legs 90 degrees up and then slowly lower them so they almost touch the ground and then lift them back up to 90 degrees again  — leg lift?) instead.

If you’re interested in trying this out– join me!

I’ll let you know how it goes!