But the best part of the day definitely started after lunch break! We had another training session but suddenly, for whatever reason, we started talking about how great casual Fridays are and we were trying to come up with themes we could apply to them… from the “pyjama” theme, we ended up talking about who in the office might wear what by night… we also thought about having a blog about everything that happens in the office on a Friday! It was great fun and we were 5 girls (including our boss) talking about negligées and underwear until the only male colleague in the room was pleading “please stop that”… next thing he wrote down onto his To Do List was: “Find a Therapist”….

This Friday was not really productive but we had lots of fun and it was great to get to know my colleagues on a more private basis as well! The atmosphere was definitely great and I am soooo looking forward to next casual Friday in a week….

I still feel scared about my new job and all the responsibilities that come along with it but on the other hand, I love my new colleagues and job life!

I had a pretty good start on Monday morning. Thank god I am not the only new person in the office. With me, two others started on Monday as well and we are going to be trained together. The whole week was training! Every morning I got scared about what we were going to do but at the end of the day, I usually felt a bit more relaxed and secure!

It was a stressful week so far. Lot’s of new faces and experiences and a total information overload! But it’s getting better and I learn more every day. It is definitely a challenge but I just tell myself that they wouldn’t have hired me if they wouldn’t believe I am able to do the job! I am going to be fine but it just needs a bit of time to adjust and learn everything.

Today I had my first official meeting! It was good and the team I’ll be working in is great! They are all really nice and approachable all the time.

Now, it’s time to drink a glass of wine, lie down in bed and enjoy a good book! More information will follow soon!!!!

I don’t exactly what I love so much about that city but when I’ve been there two years ago, I just felt comfortable and kind of at home right away! I love the atmosphere and the busy people surrounding me! In general I am a person who likes living or being in big cities. At least for now. I don’t know if this will change at some point when I have a family. Then I might move to the countryside but I will always have to live close to a metropolis. I can absolutely not live without it!!!

NYC is just great and beautiful and I would love to go there again! Maybe in a year’s time when I worked here for a year. That’s the good thing about my job here. I’ll always have the possibility to transfer to another office and fortunately, the headquarter is based in NYC….

But now I should stop dreaming and better get ready for my first day at work! Wish me luck that I’ll like my colleagues and that I enjoy my new tasks…

Today is the very last day of University life. We have to hand in our final business project and from that moment on we’ll be free! Life as a student will be completely over then. We can go wherever we like and do whatever we like! Handing in this project is the very last duty we have to fulfill!

At the moment I am happy about that but I know for sure that after a while I will be missing student life. Being a student is a great time. Of course, we complained about the workload, about all the essays we had to write, all the presentations we had to give and all the studying we were expected to do. But on the other hand we had lots of free time and lots of holidays! When we start working we’ll have a certain number of holidays a year and that’s it! We’ll have responsibility not only for us and our work but also for the company we are working for. While studying, you are more or less just responsible for your own studies and not for somebody else’s. Nobody depends on whether you hand in an essay on time or whether you pass an exam except of yourself. In working life this will be different! Colleagues and bosses will depend on your work and this gives you more responsibility.

On the one hand, I am really looking forward to starting my work life but on the other hand I am scared as well! Will I be able to handle the responsibility and able to fulfill what is asked from me? Tomorrow I’ll be moving to my metropolis. I always wanted to live in London. Now it’s my turn to fulfill this dream…

I would not only use it for traveling but it would be as well useful to sit down in a coffee place or in a park and work there. This way, I can get out of the house and still able to work. On weekends that are not that busy, I usually spend some time online, checking websites, reading blogs etc… how great would it be to do that somewhere else?

Especially because I am moving to London soon and my room there will be relatively small, going out for a coffee sounds great! Being able to take a computer with me in my handbag without feeling as if I am carrying a brick around would be fantastic…

I know it is not absolutely necessary to have a netbook and I obviously have to focus on spending money for rent and public transportation now but in a few months, this could be something I’d like to reward myself with…

At the moment I am focussing on the probably oldest and most intense hobby I have: Reading books. A while ago, I started writing a blog about the books I am reading, giving reviews and my opinion on the stuff I read. I really enjoy doing that and I am working on my blog several times a day. I am constantly updating it with new features, posts and pages. Additionally, I set up a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account for my blog. Yesterday I found as well this amazing website which is called Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com/). I created my own profile there as well! It is a great platform to share and talk about books and to find people who love the same things I love. Through this whole book blog writing thing, I figured out that I really like blogs and I started reading and following other blogs. I already connected my blog to other interesting blogs and I find new interesting blogs out there every day. One lead to another because on every blog you can find new recommendations for other blogs… So, my once just reading hobby lead me to a complete new hobby: Blogging!

Blogging is not just interesting for me for private reasons but as well for professional reasons. For a year now, I am working as a community manager and thus, I work with everything that has to do with the Web 2.0 and blogging is one big part of that. Before becoming a blogger myself, I wasn’t really aware of this part of Web 2.0 and I am still surprised which big new world is presenting itself to me there.

Through blogs, I can find as well information about all my other big hobbies like photography, cooking, traveling, languages, cultures, music, TV-Shows and movies… There are blogs for everything. But while I do not even have the time to find an read blogs about all these hobbies, how on earth am I supposed to do all these things? I do not even have the time to satisfy one hobby completely. There are lots of books I still have to read piling up here. I tried reading several at the same time but that does not speed up the process as I found out.

A day is just to short to cook a great meal, watch funny TV-Shows or a movie, listen to good music, read a good book, learn a new language, take fantastic pictures or even travel… A day just has 24 hours and when I am going to start working I will spend a third of those 24 hours working, another third on sleeping and the last third is the time I can use for my hobbies, my friends and all the other things that have to be done throughout a day…

I just wish I could win the lottery so that I would have more time to do all these things because I would not need an actual job to earn money. I would have a job, for sure, because I need something that keeps me busy, something where I would have to go to every day but that does not have to be the whole day. 4 hours of work a day would be perfect. Getting up early in the morning, working a bit and then spend time on all my hobbies. That would be my dream day….

Developers of social media websites are creating new features and applications on a daily basis. In the beginning, users just had a profile and they shared their information with their friends. Now users are linked to companies, to applications, to people from work etc. The security settings are changing almost every day and if you do not keep track of them it can happen that suddenly everybody knows where you are meeting your friends right now… This problem became even bigger since users started using social networks everywhere they go through their smartphones.

Networks offer a lot of possibilities to protect a profile but using them responsibly in order to protect your data from others can become quite hard, even for people who care a lot about that. Facebook for example offers the possibility to create friend lists. After setting up those lists, you can easily decide which list can see what on your profile which is great! But recently I discovered some gaps here. If you for example post something that is only visible for a certain group of people, it can still happen that one of these people posts a comment on this on your wall which is then visible for everybody again.

Another thing is that, since we are now connected to literally everyone and thus are more selective about who should see what, we always have to think through what we are posting to whom. It happened to me in the past that I did not thought a post through completely and just forgot to exclude certain people and once something is posted, it is out there. Of course you can delete it afterwards but if you realise your mistake too late, people who were not supposed to might already have seen it.

So, can we find a solution for that problem? Here are some possibilities:

• just have personal contacts in your friend list who you wish to see everything you publish
• have a separate profile for colleagues and/or loose contacts
• reduce the amount of information you share

If you cannot abdicate anything of those points, you have to be really really careful and think about everything you post. You have to think through every possibility because mistakes like that can have major consequences in real life because social media already plays an important part of our real life and tends to become even more important and more complicated in the future. My tip is to not post too much private stuff, do not include personal information like addresses and phone numbers on your profile and always check your security settings on a regular basis. Even if you keep track of all of this, there are still some loopholes that create a real danger.

Social networks are great for all the things I mentioned above and I personally love them and would not know what to do without them but using them responsibly and protecting ones own security is a crucial point that shouldn’t be forgotten…

Today, a friend of mine is going to Australia for a year to do work and travel. I am really happy for her and I think that it was a great decision to do that. But then I start to feel curious about Australia as well and about all the other countries that are still out there waiting for me to be discovered!!! Am I wasting my time with spending at least another year in a country that I am already familiar with and that is not that foreign to me anymore?

All my life I loved traveling and exploring the world! I love foreign countries, foreign languages, cultures and food! I enjoy getting to know different people and their attitudes from all over the world! In my opinion, this enriches my life as well! I might start looking at things from a different perspective that would have never occurred to me before.

Thinking of all this, I have to remind myself that I already have done more in my life than many many other people will ever do and staying a year longer in the UK does not mean that this is the the final destination of my journey around the world! It is just another interesting and enriching experience that helps me developing myself and understanding the world we are living in even better…

Now I am curious to meet new people, to discover London much deeper than I already have and to gain new experiences through my work as a marketing executive!

Directly after leaving the plane in London on Wednesday made me feel much better. Seeing my friends was great but meeting my parents wasn’t. At least meeting my mum again was a nightmare! Suddenly my whole past life overtook me and made me feel awful! It was definitely the right decision to stay in the UK!

Now the real new beginning of my life is about to start! I had to make sure that I get a smartphone in order to do my freelancer job and my marketing job in London at the same time. At least I do not have to be at home this way. After arranging that my next tasks are now to finally finish my business project and to find a place to stay in London. I have a whole week from today to find something. But I am really excited because I already found a place that looked nice online and I am going to view it tomorrow evening. It is in a perfect location, close to central London and close to work! I just have to hope that I like the other two girls who are already living there and that the flat looks as nice from the inside as it does from the outside…

This whole project of starting my life from scratch is getting more and more exciting but now it is more a positive form of excitement and since I came back to the UK I feel much better because I do not have to think about everything that is depressing me back in Germany. Of course there is still number27 but I already deleted him from my friend lists in my social networks and I decided that I don’t want to see him again.

Starting from scratch feels good! New ob, new place, new experiences! Looking forward to it…