Decision is made

I made my college decision yesterday:

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The enrollment deposit is made. I notified the other schools that accepted me so that they can admit students from their waitlist. My major is Biology.

Gathering Blue concludes

This was the second and final night of my school's spring play, Gathering Blue. As intended, it proceeded like the opening night. There was a new (possibly larger) audience, with somewhat different reactions to different scenes.

After the show concluded, as is tradition on closing night, the cast stayed on the stage instead of leaving, calling up our director so she could be recognized. Since blue is a centerpiece in the play, I found it appropriate for us to give her a bouquet of blue flowers as well as a blue pendant.

This was my last play at the school - I'll be graduating in about a month.

Opening Night 2017

Today was the opening night for my school's spring play, Gathering Blue, based on the novel of the same name by Lois Lowry and turned into a drama by Eric Coble. I played the role of Jamison, a member of the Council of Guardians. This was the first play in which I wore a wig, so that was an interesting new thing to manage.

Left: the actress playing Kira; right: me

Cold calling not effective so far

Today I continued the project of trying to get more customers for a software product of mine. I have not met with as much success as I had hoped:

• One company on my list doesn't even use the necessary companion product despite being listed on that product's web site as a long-time user
• Another is actually out of business, despite being listed on the web site
• One answered the phone, I asked to speak with the person who I had already e-mailed, but he was unavailable, so the phone answerer took a message, but the person I was trying to reach has not responded in any way

I have yet to expand into non-already-emailed potential customers. Hopefully those future attempts will go better.

Sorting through sales strategies

I'm currently trying to market a product to a certain rather niche market. The pool of potential customers is finite and indeed quite small, so it's very important that I make the best of the contacts I've found.

There is no shortage of sales strategy articles or cold e-mail templates on the web. I have no trouble getting ideas. The problem is that there are so many, and all the advice is conflicting. Not a single article that I recall has specified what markets/circumstances its contents should be used on. I feel that the more informal examples would be inappropriate for my target audience. There's even one page with nine different formats for cold e-mails, which all use different methods of persuasion. Still, no mention of what cases each is appropriate for.

Usually I would try to meet in the middle and incorporate aspects from everything I read, but such e-mails are supposed to be concise. A bland, safe message would probably be supremely useless in terms of audience engagement. This will be a tricky project.

I Voted

I missed being able to vote in the 2016 general election by a month. My township held an election today for a few local positions, so I got to exercise my civic duty for the first time.

I hadn't registered in advance - I didn't know this election was coming up. Therefore, I couldn't vote at the township hall. So I went to the area's courthouse and registered there. After a very brief wait while they processed my registration, I voted in a room of the courthouse.

Interestingly, there was only one position with more candidates than seats. There were also plenty of positions with no candidates running; I'm not sure how those will be filled.

All the college decisions are in

This week, I received the last two college admission decisions - Dartmouth and Stanford. Both were rejections, but that's to be expected; those are very prestigious institutions. On the plus side, that means all my applications have been judged, and I already have a pretty narrow list:

• University of Iowa
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Reed College
• University of California, San Diego
• (University of Chicago - waitlisted)

Now I need to decide, probably between UCSD and Reed. College Decision Day is May 1, only a month away.