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Grace of iBlog: Her City, Her Voice

Her Campus Placeholder Avatar Grace Cho
Her Campus Placeholder Avatar Jaimee Swift
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Temple chapter.

One of our junior HCTuers in training, Grace is an amazing young lady. Spunky, elegant and opinionated are only but a few words to describe Grace’s personality. An inspiring and intelligent young woman, Grace makes her opinions known and is definitely a forced to be reckoned with. 

Read a post from Grace’s fashion blog, Glamour Galaxy!

-spring cleaning-

 I have a confession. I am a shopaholic. I buy so much junk that my “room” is more of a “nest”, because the word “room” suggests some amount of usable space. My floor has at least two layers of clothing and shoes. Any once-empty space on my furniture and piano is occupied by piles of books I have no time to read. The cute boy at Barnes and Noble attempts to comfort me on my daily visits by saying my shopping addiction is “better than meth”.
  The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Well, that’s pretty easy since the problem physically prevents me from walking through my door. Not to mention that I keep breaking things due to stepping on them.
  All this self-pity brings me to the point of this post: SPRING CLEANING. We all fear it, yet we all have to do it. So here are my tips, tricks, and rules of taking on the impossible: spring cleaning.
 
Goals
Set yourself some goals for your task, that you will be excited to reach. These will serve as the motivation for your hard work. Here are mine.

1. Have a clean and presentable room in the next four days.
2. Rid myself of all I do not need, want, or use.
3. Make money selling nice things I don’t use. My goal is to buy a couple albums I’ve been wanting with the money, because digital music takes up no space in my nest (can I call it a room yet?).
4. Donate things that are in good condition to Goodwill or a women’s shelter.

Rules
After years of attempting to tidy up all this stuff every so often, I have come up with some important rules of cleaning. 
1. Do all the laundry, which for me is seven baskets. I will do all of it. Even the things I don’t want anymore, because I could give them away or sell them.

2. If it hasn’t been used in a year or more, get rid of it. The only exceptions here are books and sentimental items, like pictures.

3. If it is damaged, throw it out. Unless there is a solid plan in the next week to get something fixed or altered, I have to stop kidding myself.

4. Organize everything! Buy storage containers, shoe boxes, and filing boxes. Label it all, and keep things in place.

5. Do some real cleaning. Scrub the bathroom, vacuum the floor, dust the cabinets. It’s not clean if it’s dusty and covered in my dog’s hair.

6. Keep things clean. I don’t want to have to “spring clean” again in two weeks.

Tips on making cleaning fun
1. Plan a clothing swap. Invite your friends over for dinner and tell them to bring all the clothes they don’t want anymore. I’ve done this before with great success, and we all got new things for our wardrobes. I also donated the remaining pile of unwanted clothes, which was quite satisfying considering it filled four garbage bags.

2. Blast your favorite “power” songs and sing along with them. I especially recommend this if there is no one else around to tell you to shut up.

3. Download some interesting podcasts. I absolutely love Chicago Public Radio’s “This American Life”. Whatever your interests are, there will be many podcasts for it.

4. Buy an audiobook of something you’ve been meaning to read. This is my favorite thing to do, because I feel twice as productive. I listened to the entire Hunger Games series in six days. I have no regrets.

5. Make the cleaning into a dance. Shake it! Did you know cleaning is good exercise? Now do you want to tackle your bathroom?

Thank you for reading this, and I wish you luck. All my rules and goals are slightly suited to what I need, so feel free to create some of your own. Tell me what they are in the comments section below!

To read more about Grace and her fashion blog, click here: http://glamourgalaxy.blogspot.com/

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Grace joined the Her Campus team in February 2013 as the Account Executive in Marketing. She attended Harvard University, where she majored in Economics, minored in Psychology, and was a member of Expressions Dance Company and Kappa Alpha Theta. After graduating in 2010, Grace worked at Bloomingdale's in NYC for two and a half years - first as the Lingerie Assistant Buyer for Department stores, and then as a Senior Assistant Buyer in the Outlet division, where she managed the entire multi-million dollar Kids' business. Grace enjoys running; dancing with her friends; keeping up with the latest fashion trends; reading People and Instyle magazine; and drinking wine while watching The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and Bachelor Pad with her friend Lauren. 
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Jaimee Swift is a Senior majoring in Communications. One of her many dreams is to become a broadcast journalist and to meet and work with the infamous Anderson Cooper. Her hobbies include reading everything in sight, running, dancing crazily, laughing uber hard, watching movies, and consuming as much juice as possible. Jaimee is so overjoyed to be a part of such a magnificent site such as Her Campus Temple University. Ever since the days of her youth, she has strives to make a difference and bring positive change to all that she touches. She still holds on to that mindset and hopes to bring positivity and creativity to Her Campus Temple University!