estimated reading time: 3-5 minutes
Hi everyone!
The entire month of April and nearly half of May has passed since my last email, which is crazy. I figure it’s time for an update on life, and what I’ve been up to.
One of the biggest events that occurred was the Piano UO Festival last Saturday, that I was in charge of. Essentially, the festival is a day-long event where we ran 4 recitals, 4 faculty masterclasses, 5 college student masterclasses, an opening ceremony, and a stamp rally all from about 10:30am-5pm. You can imagine the sheer manpower it took to get all the volunteers together, take lunch orders, make purchase orders with the accountants, get our funding in order, and create programs with all this information. If you click on that website link, I designed and entered in all that information by myself just FYI. We saw at least 150 people that day come through our doors, so it was a success! But success does not come without its hiccups, and we had plenty of those along the way. There were disagreements, volunteer issues, and just overall uncertainty around certain things happening the way they were intended to happen. But, I’m glad it’s done, and if I have the time, I’ll write a whole manual so that future students can plan for future iterations of this event.
Another big update is that I submitted my performance of this super cool duo piece to a keyboard pedagogy conference, and it got accepted! So my duo partner Andrew and I will be heading to Chicago in July to play at The Piano Conference: NCKP 2025. This is our first conference acceptance (hopefully first of many!) and my mom will be hitching a ride with me too. So we’ll be visiting the Windy City for the first time! NCKP also graciously gave me a scholarship to cover the registration fee, so I’ll be attending for free (they make presenters pay too, isn’t that ironic). I’m working on securing funding to take care of the plane ticket and possibly the hotel as well, so I can get a (mostly) free trip out of this. This is the benefit of being a student still: people know you’re broke and have avenues for you to get big purchases expense-d by larger organizations that have the money to spare.
Okay those are my two big career updates. Some more personal fun updates include:
Visiting this horse farm run by 2 lesbians
Playing charades after the festival and someone getting this prompt
My teacher’s beagle making an appearance at my lesson (and being an absolute menace)
this is the face of someone who walked ALL OVER my feet and legs while I was playing
My friend having a full sword in her car and letting me borrow it/swing it around
what i’m watching: I’ve been watching a lot of Guillermo del Toro movies as part of my GDT class, but I also watched Sinners (2025) recently and that was good! And I’m still working on The Apothecary Diaries S2.
Happy AAPI month!
Helen
