Hey y’all. Well, he’s a waste of money if i have ever seen one. I had to get tested to TB in order to study abroad. And the health center charged me thirty dollars to do this. THIRTY DOLLARS!!! Honestly, how many people on BW campus do you think have TB. My guess is a whopping zero. Maybe. But, i mean they couldn’t tell i was fine from my healthy looking visage or my lack or all signs of TB. Whatever. Well, that was my last bit of paperwork for Aussieland, so i will be going to down under next semester officially.

On a different note, this weekend is the play, A Nightmare of Crime. It’s about the holocaust and was written by one of the professors here. I hear it’s very good and i plan on going tonight or tomorrow night. I’ll keep y’all posted on the level of amazing/depressing the play exhibits.

Thank goodness that this week is somewhat, unofficially over. I had two tests this week, have been working on a project, been kept busy as ever with the Statistics homework that NEVER ENDS. I will be so ready when some of these classes are OVER! But I realize, at the end of each week, it is just bringing me closer to the end of my four-year journey. This semester has been flying by, and I keep looking forward to Fridays and the weekend. I know though, that one of these days, the last Friday is going to come and I will be wanting all of my Mondays thru Thursdays back from B-W. Another event that has been going on is the OAC basketball tournament. Last night the women advanced to the Championship game (Saturday) and the men play tonight in the semi-finals down at Capital University. Yesterday was a lot of fun, as me and Dan Badders, the president of the Sport Management Club, handed out over 100 pom-poms as a part of a second half rally. The girls ended up winning a nail-biter, which I am sure was credited to the pom-poms (wink). Hopefully there will be a great turn-out to support the women to an OAC tournament championship!!

So, today alone was busy… I had three budgeting meetings for BW clubs, one lasted 3 hours and 45 minuets!! Now I only have one more to go and I’m done! Right Now I should be writing a 3 page paper for my class but… who can say no to blogging lol. Anyhow, tomorrow I’m actually going to go to the car show at the IX center I hope I win that car they are giving away…. wish me luck lol

England update…. I went shopping for the people hosting me when I’m there (which is so amazing of them to do). Out of all the American products they could pick from i had to get them Oreo’s, Twinkies, “American Bagels” and of all things… Pumpkin Pie mix. I kid you not, my friends from England LOVED pumpkin while they were here at BW… apparently Pumpkin Pie is an american thing. I can actually say I think Pumpkin Pie is nasty.. I don’t like it. So while I’m there I have to make Pumpkin Pie for them lol… its kind of funny to think about eating Pumpkin Pie beyond thanksgiving.

Anyway I need to get back to that paper I was talking about

Last week, I’m “proud” to admit, I managed to get like 10 hours of sleep over the course of three days. I had a lot of work to do over the first two nights, and an LAS paper that I underestimated dearly caused me and my roommate to pull all-nighters the third. We went in the lobby of Klein with laptops and books and ended up just hanging out all night long with other people who were just up late, occasionally typing. I finished it on time, of course, and had to go to class at 8:00 the next morning for a math test. I was fairly happy to find that I got a 93 on the test, and I think I may have gotten the highest score of the class (yaaay). But rest assured both me and my roommate slept maybe 12 hours once Friday night rolled around. I lived off of caffeine for that day, and it was interesting to see what it was like to run on no sleep like that, and I surprisingly was alert for all my classes that day.

This week, however, I’m rested just fine, and I’m finally starting to see feedback from work earlier in the semester, and I’m happy to see my results are almost all B or A material. It’s all about divided study time like I’ve been trying- as opposed to cramming for hours the night before a test. Still, being here for English and education I don’t tend to see that many tests, especially compared to my physical therapy roommate, Phil, who gets tests weekly. I guess some people might argue whether lots of tests are worse than all the papers I have to write, but I’m content with how I have it since I’ve always thought papers were fairly easy for me. But now the weekend is coming, and I don’t have to worry about any tests or papers, so I think I’ll be fine.

Today I woke up to a good eight inches of snow covering my car. Lets just say after brushing my car off, scraping it off, re-brushing it by the time I was done scraping, and then rocking my car out of my parking lot space, I was a little late for class. Approximately 400 local schools have been cancelled, one school cancellation in particular makes my roommate very happy so she gets to sleep in instead of student teach. One thing that is kind of unfortunate is that the men’s and women’s OAC basketball tournament have been postponed. If it is cancelled again for today, they may have to drop the lowest four seeds out of eight in order to ensure that a champion is determined. The winner of the OAC tournament will have an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament the following week. I am really excited for March Madness to start up soon, and for this weater to get nicer!

Spring semester, once you get near Spring Break, you hear a lot of talk about where people are going to live the following school year. I have pretty much decided to leave the honors program here, as it is a waste of credit hours in my personal opinion, and therefore can’t live in honors housing like I have this year. The honors program has the first floor of the Carmel Living and Learning Center reserved for freshman honors students and that is where I live this year. It is very, very nice. Instead of sharing a bathroom with a whole floor of people, my roomate, suitemates, and I share a bathroom and shower between the four of us. The other way to live in Carmel is to take one of the classes offered in the building. I have signed up to live here again next year and take either International and Intercultural Film: A Foreign Aesthetic or Life and Literature of Early Britain. Unlike most incoming freshman, however, once you start thinking of housing for sophomore year, you also have to think of the roommate situation. Now, my current roommate and I get along, we aren’t one of those horror stories where the roommates can’t stand each other, but we also aren’t best friends. I think this is partially because she is an Oboe/Chemistry double major who plays golf. The only things we vaguely have in common are that neither of us are from Cleveland, that we both play instruments (I play viola, but am not in the conservatory or involved in the conservatory like she is), and we both kinda work for admissions (she gives tours and has hosted a prospective student while I write this blog). But although we get along, we are not going to room together next year. She is going to live with a golf buddy and I am going to live with my friend Desi (with a fellow blogger, Natalie, as a suitemate). There is the option of having the university randomly assign a roommate again, but I think it is better to chose a friend to room with. It doesn’t even have to be a person you are particularly close to, as a friend of mine and her roomate are best friends, but when they decided to room together, they had barely known each other.
Then there is the possibility of becoming an RA. You get paid, have your own room, but also have the responsibility of monitoring your fellow students. For some reason, I never found this position appealing, but a lot of students have signed up to be RA’s (eventhough there are somehow still openings in two buildings). You have to at least be a sophomore and I’m sure there is a GPA requirement as well, but I dunno for sure. Everyone else, who aren’t commuters or living in houses or apartments, need to make a housing deposit for a random room draw. Yet, you can still request a roommate with random room draw. Oh, there are also the sorority and fraternity floors, which I don’t think are allocated via random room draw.

Okay, so the reason I haven’t been blogging recently (and yes I do have a real excuse :P) is because I have been on the model UN three week tour. For the past three weekends I have gone to three conferences, representing Spain, Qatar and Canada respectively. The very first one was a single day conference, really just a warm up, at Lakeland Community College. Two members of BW’s team did post-secondary at Lakeland and actually helped set up the first simulation there. There were six of us who went to that conference, and we stayed at Sam’s house where his mom made amazing mexican food and we got waaay too little sleep. We had 5 countries: Spain, Denmark, Canada, Portugal, and France. Sam (France) and Camilo (Portugal) won awards, but BW as a whole pretty much dominated the proceedings.The following two weekends actually started on Wednesday/Thursday. On Valentine’s day, 12 BW students (including myself) flew out to Boston for a simulation at the Park Plaza hotel, hosted by Harvard University (all expenses except food paid for by the school). I was the representative for Qatar on DISEC. There were around 300 people on my committee when we were all in the room. Most schools sent a double delegation (two people per country) for the larger GA committees like DISEC and it made it that much harder to coordinate policy. There were no assigned seats as at LEIMUN or smaller conferences, so I had to go and find the other Arab countries, which was rather hard. There were pages, or people from double delegations, who took notes passed to the end of the rows and would look at sheets with the names of which delegation was sitting where to pass the notes to whom they were written. The size of DISEC really bugged me, as it took at least a day to get all the arab countries together, but the best part had to be the diversity of schools there. Yale, at least 5 schools from Venezuela, Oxford University, schools from Spain and other Latin American Countries (like Peru), and other international schools sent delegations to this model. However, because of the size, again, it was hard to make connections to anyone there (except your teamates) This is the opposite of our final conference, which was this past weekend. We drove from BW to Washington DC on Wednesday night after classes (I rode with my professor and two other students) and then visited the Canadian embassy Thursday morning. BW had two countries for this conference, Canada and Denmark. I was on the Defence Committee (it was a NATO simulation and not a UN simulation). Thursday we just had opening remarks and no actual session, which was nice because it was a much smaller version of Harvard (there were about 20-30 countries on my committee, with one person for each usually) and we could mingle and meet other people easier. There were three schools from Canada and a lot of schools from Ohio, but that is probably because the Model NATO was co-sponsored by Kent University. Converse college from South Carolina (an all-girls school) chairs the conference and has two countries to represent as well(which I have some problems with this set-up, but I don’t think it would be a good idea to go into that now). The biggest news, however, would have to be the results from this conference. BW won a lot of awards. On the political committee Camilo representing Canada won Outstanding Delegation and the Leadership award. On the NAC (most important committee) Sam was one vote away from winning Outstanding Delegation for Canada. On Defence, Ivonne representing Denmark won Outstanding Delegation. On Working Group, Riley and Ellen was one vote away from the Leadership award. Then overall, the Denmark delegation received an honourable mention and Canada won an Outstanding Delegation award. I don’t know how Kevin (my partner) and myself did votes wise for any awards, but I was sick Friday and Saturday of the conference and I was really out of it on Friday when we had three sessions (it was pretty much the whole day, compared to the one morning session on Saturday). I still explored DC anyway, but I am definitely glad we don’t have another conference this weekend. I am so exhausted! Anyway, now I need to go do my homework which I have not been focusing on too much over the past three weeks. Adiós

This blog sort of piggy-backs off of Paul’s mentioning of the B-W Organizational Budgeting meetings taking place. I recently attended one of the infamous budgeting meetings for Omicron Delta Kappa Leadership Honorary, of which I am President.

What a spectacle! So many organizations in one room, and everyone wanted to get ALL of their budget. It was certainly an interesting process to see people sacrifice and make cuts to their needs for the benefit and equality of everyone. Some groups were a little less giving than others, some were also equally protective and reluctant of their group’s proposed budget items.

For me, I was able to make it out of there in decent shape. While our organization took a bit of a hit to our budget, we’re new in the game and were actually going for a budget for the first time for next year. Up until now, we’ve always acquired funding through co-sponsorships (mainly from Senate). So, going through the official process will at least make everything a little easier for the officers of ODK next year. Hopefully they have a pleasant experience in the budgeting meeting when it’s their turn. For me, I’m just happy to have experienced it all before I graduated; it’s certainly a one-of-a-kind opportunity

Hello from the Bach Institute! This semester I am working as the student transportation coordinator for the annual Bach Festival. Bach Fest is a huge deal in the Con and I’m sure I’ll write more about what actually goes on with it concert-wise in April. What I’m doing now is coordinating the guest artist’s schedules and making up packets for the student’s who will drive them around while they’re here. It’s actually kind of an interesting job. I get to communicate with the artist’s and their agents, make up packets with all the travel, lodging, and food information they’ll need while they’re here, etc. Campus jobs are really pretty cool. While I’ve been at BW I’ve worked in the instrument room, I’ve tutored, worked for the New Horizons Band program, and of course I write this blog. Working a campus job gives you an inside view on how things work at BW and you get to work closely with people you might not otherwise get to know as well.

Last night I attended a speaker, Mark Hartley. While open to the entire college community, he came to present mainly about academics, particularly targeting the Greek Community (fraternities and sororities). One of the Greek Community’s founding pillars is academics, and being part of one of their organizations almost equivacably means that your academics will flourish from their support.

The speaker was here not because we have a major issue with poor academics, but more to remind and reinstill the values that sometimes we forget. Greek Life is big on community service, education, scholarship, and social events, and sometimes the education and academic portion becomes more of a personal issue and not a collective/group point to be checking on. While grade checks are done and a minimum GPA is set for each organization, it is important for them to be continually working to better address and serve the academic needs of their members through creative and beneficial ways. Even when individuals are doing well academically, there are always ways with which they could be doing better or making things easier on themselves with improved methods of study or dilligence.

Mark was a dynamic speaker that had a lot of practical examples to apply. I think everyone took something away from the presentation, and certainly brought the idea of academics, and reevaluating ALL the standards and principles, to the forefront of many organizational leaders’ minds. While I personally do not struggle much academically, it’s important to gather information and have tools necessary to relate and help others when given the opportunity to help or mentor someone who does struggle.