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Sophomore Year – G.O.A.L.S.
Global Awareness: I began Freshman year taking Hebrew for my foreign language G.E. requirement because it was a language that interested me and I felt it would allow me to connect more with my culture. Little did I know, this one decision at my orientation would alter my educational experience. I love the professor for the Hebrew courses and I decided that I wanted to continue taking them. This developed into my desire to pursue a Hebrew minor, which I am now doing almost two years later. The minor combines both language coursework and culture classes so I really feel like I am learning about Israeli culture and all of the complexities that exist there in addition to gaining new language skills. I am so excited to continue this learning process. I am also considering the possibility of completing an education abroad trip next summer to further my global awareness.
Original Inquiry: Many of the courses I have taken have incorporated scholarly research papers into the curriculum, including, English 1110.02 H, Sociology 1101 H, Theatre 2100 H, and Communication 2367 H. Each of these courses approached research in a different way, whether it was to analyze literary texts or performances, critique an aspect of society, or to persuade an audience on an issue I am passionate about. I have learned how to find scholarly sources that can be used in furthering my own theses, as well as how to identify what is a good source and how useful the library is in helping to compile sources on a specific topic. I plan to continue to take classes, mostly honors classes, that allow me to engage in the research process to produce more works of writing that will allow me to become even more comfortable with doing research, a skill that will be incredibly helpful for my future endeavors.
Academic Enrichment: The classes I chose for my honors contract were chosen to meet the honors requirements while also allowing me to explore my interests both in regard to my future aspirations and sometimes just our of curiosity. I chose to major in communication because I am still not exactly sure what career I want to go into after graduation, but I know that communication is an incredibly valuable skill for any profession and will be able to take me into many different professions. I also have enjoyed all of my communication coursework thus far. I already noted why I decided to pursue a Hebrew minor. It fuels my personal interests while also adding a unique aspect to my degree and resume. Classes in a different language are also very challenging. I chose many of the G.E.s that I did because they were classes in areas that I wished or still wish to explore, such as sociology or social psychology. My classes show a commitment to the honors curriculum, and for any class that I opted to not select an honors course when I could have was because it was a class that I wanted to explore that didn’t have an honors option available, such as HDFS 2367. I feel like my Honors Contract demonstrates a strong and well-rounded curriculum overall.
Leadership Development: Throughout my time here at Ohio State, I have become very involved at the OSU Hillel, which is the center for Jewish students on campus. Through Hillel I hold the position of a Ruderman Inclusion Ambassador, where my job is to reach out to Jewish OSU students with disabilities or who struggle with their mental health and connect them to the supportive community at Hillel, while also implementing programming and initiatives that cater to our diverse student body. I also work with Nekevah, a Jewish women’s group through Hillel, and help with the planning and promotion of their events. These opportunities have given me experiences in the Jewish community, an area that I have thought about working in for a while now. It has also given me the experience of interacting with diverse groups of people and implementing my ideas on a larger scale. This has allowed me to do some much needed internal discovery and realize that I want to work in a helping field with people who have similar values to me and interact with people on a daily basis. I also am a member of the Honors Collegium which has taught me many professional development skills, such as how to create an elevator pitch or how to craft an effective LinkedIn profile. These skills will be incredibly beneficial no matter which career path I take, and the Collegium has also been another way I have been able to seek out experiences that will help me decide what I want to do after college.
Service Engagement: Thus semester, I applied and was accepted into the Honors & Scholars Semester of Service program in the Mental Health cohort. More specifically, I am volunteering at the OSU Suicide Prevention Program, and this semester we are working to reach out to faith-based organizations in the OSU community to create partnerships between them and the Suicide Prevention Program. Additionally, through Nekevah that I am a part of, we have had an ongoing project of creating fleece tie blankets that have been donated to Huckleberry House in Columbus. At all of our events we ask for donations of hygiene products that also go to Huckleberry House. These experiences have both been so personally rewarding, and I am hoping to continually find organizations that need help, just as I did with Semester of Service. I am also continuing my involvement with Nekevah in the coming years to keep helping the community of women in Columbus.
Intervention Specialist
A few days ago I met with an intervention specialist, though she has always worked in various role in the realm of special education. From what I gathered in the meeting, she has worn may hats in the schools, but what really drives her is how much she cares about the kids that she works with. A typical day consists of meeting with families and her team, responding to emails and phone calls, and writing reports about students who qualify for IEPs, among other things. I like this because it is a mix of interacting with people but also time to work by yourself, but it also seems like a large amount of writing comes with this role. I am not always the best with writing under stress or on a strict deadline, and she did express that sometimes there are so many cases she has to work on that it can feel like too much. As far as the skills that she expressed are necessary, many seemed to overlap with the positive traits that I already posses, which I found incredibly helpful for me: organization, attention to detail, problem solving, communicating with others, and caring. Though, with deeply caring could cause me to become too invested in my work and personally affected by my emotions, because caring about children is often a hard thing to deal with when they are dealing with such difficult things, or their parents aren’t helping them in the way that they need. There is also lots of room for growth and movement when working in the schools which I like because I am very indecisive and I think I would get bored doing the same exact thing for a very long time. I think it’s important to work in different roles to see what fits. Overall, I don’t know if this exact position is for me, but I definitely could see myself working in a school setting in some way.
My Project
My Honors Collegium project this year will be an intentional career exploration process. I have identified career areas of interest, and throughout the rest of the year I will be scheduling meetings with professionals who work in these areas. After each meeting I will reflect on the interaction in this section of my ePortfolio.
Ruderman Inclusion Ambassador
This year I took on the role of being a Ruderman Inclusion Ambassador for the Ohio State Hillel, the Jewish student center on campus. My job in this role is to connect students with disabilities and those who struggle with mental health to the community at Hillel, and I also am working to implement initiatives at Hillel that will make it more inclusive for our students.
I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience during the first seven weeks of the semester meeting students who are struggling and connecting with them on a personal level. This job has combined my passions for helping people with my interests with Jewish culture, and it has been really cool for me to see that different areas can combine, and that I don’t just have to choose one aspect of my life to focus on. With my future career, I know for a fact that I want to do something that helps the greater good. Additionally, since I really love being involved in the Jewish community, this has been a really great role for me to take on, and has also aided in my self-discovery process. I could definitely see myself continuing this type of work in the future.
An Evening with Adam Rippon
“The ice is slippery, and we’re all human.”
Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we feel like the world is out to get us. Sometimes we don’t know what’s next. And that is just as normal for an Olympian as it is for a college student. This was the message I took from OUABreaking the Ice with Olympic Figure Skater Adam Rippon at the Ohio Union this past Wednesday evening.
I chose to go to this event mainly because I was a big fan of Adam during and after the 2018 Olympic Games, but I underestimated the deeper meaning I would get out of his presentation. Though many of the struggles in his life related to making it in figure skating I was able to see how many of the themes of his stories related to my current experiences.
In both the qualifiers for the 2010 and 2014 Olympics Adam failed to make the United States figure skating team. He felt like the dream he had worked for since he was a child was over. However, upon later introspection he realized that his mess ups were the best thing to ever happen to him. He saw that previously he was focusing so hard on being the perfect skater, but then he realized that if he focused on enjoying the process of skating he would be a winner no matter whether he won or lost a competition.
For me in my studies, as many students do, I put tremendous pressure on myself to be perfect. Oftentimes, this means putting other aspects of my life, such as getting enough sleep or making time to work on extracurriculars, to the wayside. While this may benefit my GPA, it also has created negative side effects for myself at times like exhaustion and anxiety. Adam’s emphasis on doing things for the right reasons has caused me to focus on changing my reasoning for getting an education from solely wanting to be successful and get good grades, to appreciating the practice of learning and the knowledge I am gaining. Additionally, I am learning that it is not just okay, but almost better, to not have perfect grades, and instead make the many facets of my life priorities. This will serve to make me a more well-rounded individual and student. It will also help me discover what I want to do by allowing me to engage in more experiences than what is presented to me in the classroom. Failing is normal and may lead to something that is actually much greater.
We’re all going to fall down on the ice sometimes, but what determines who we are, is what we take from it and how we get back up and keep moving forward.
The March for Our Lives as a Performance
In honors Intro to Theatre (Theatre 2100H) that I am taking this semester for my visual and performing arts GE with Dr. Karen Mozingo, we had an assignment to write an essay analyzing a social movement from the perspective of a performance. The movement that I chose was the March for Our Lives because it is so recent and it also is so interesting to analyze how the young Parkland students were able to make such an impact on our country in such a short period of time.
What I enjoyed most about this assignment was that it caused me to think about something I had thought about many times before through a new lens. I used Robert D. Benford and Scott A. Hunt’s “Dramaturgy and Social Movements: The Social Construction and Communication of Power” as the conceptual guide for which to frame my paper. The March for Our Lives, and really any other social movement, can be analyzed by its scripting, staging, performing, and audience. My thesis for the paper was,”The ability of the March for Our Lives to create meaning can be better understood by first examining it through the lenses of scripting, staging, and performing, in order to fully grasp the positive and negative ways its meaning was interpreted by its audience.”
This assignment allowed me to get in touch with the creative and artistic side of my mind, something that I don’t do very often, but very much enjoy. I think that in any career or part of life it is important to know how to think creatively and abstractly. This assignment reminded me that there is a more artistic side to my personality and that through slight changes of thought I can bring it out and it will benefit me in the long term with new ideas and perspectives, and it will also allow me to find more meaning in my daily experiences. Though I don’t necessarily want to dedicate my life to studying theatre, I can truly appreciate gaining a new dramaturgical way to view the world.
About Me
My name is Jordan Berkovitz, I am a second year Honors student at Ohio State, and I’m currently engaging in a purposeful career exploration because I have found it to be difficult for me to narrow down what I want to study at OSU. This has been difficult for me because I haven’t decided on a career that I want to pursue. I want to use this ePortfolio as a platform to document my exploration experiences over the next year, with a hope to help other students who may be in a similar situation find a strategy to help them discover what they would like to pursue. It’s helpful to know that you are not alone with being unsure about what you would like to study, because oftentimes in college it seems like everyone else knows exactly what they want to do with their lives. Throughout this exploration, I will be meeting with professionals working in fields that I may be interested in and finding out more about their day to day lives in their careers and and asking them a series of questions. I will then document my reactions to each experience on this ePortfolio which will help me start to see trend of which types of careers are of more interest to me. Speaking from experience, I know it is hard to have such a big part of your life be unknown, but I’m looking forward to embarking on this exploration journey and sharing it with you!
My Summer in Israel
This past May I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Israel for two and a half weeks through a program called Birthright. The first 10 days were spent touring the country with a group of 43 other American students and Israeli soldiers, along with our trip leaders and an Israeli tour guide. It was incredible to be there, knowing the limestone streets I was walking on had been there for thousands of years and walked upon by billions of people. It made me realize just how amazing it was to have the opportunity to be there myself and experience the history for myself. But, there was also this amazing sense of newness and forward-thinking. Parts of this country, such as the metropolitan area of Tel Aviv, came to be as they are today in just over 100 years, which is absolutely remarkable. This mix of the old and the new coming together is what makes Israel such a unique place. Experiencing Israel with peers from America and Israel made me think in a whole new way about my beliefs and my values. I saw how similar we all truly are. We laughed at the same jokes, liked the same foods, and knew the same prayers, but we were also able to teach each other so much about our lives in our home countries.
After the touring portion of my trip ended, I was then able to spend the last five days of my trip with my family whom I had never met before. I spent the first ten days of the trip exploring what the State of Israel means for the Jewish people. Now, I was able to explore what Israel means to me. I met so many new family members, from young to old, and was amazed with how much we were able to connect with each other even without fully understanding each others languages. I have never felt closer to my family history than I did in Israel.
Towards the end of my trip, my tour group and I went out into the desert late at night, sat on the rocks, and silently looked up at the stars. It was such a peaceful moment of reflection for me. I was trying to think about why I was so happy in this place, and I realized it is the culture and sense of community. I fully understood this summer how important it is for me to keep these things in my life. It has been hard for me trying to figure out what I want to do with my life as far as a career, or even an undergraduate major, but I am slowly realizing that the things that are fun for me, that I am passionate about, and that make me feel fulfilled in my personal life, can be more than just something I do for fun. It is key moments like the ones I had in Israel that have allowed me to fully understand this. One way I can keep myself connected to this summer through my academics is by continuing my study of Hebrew throughout my time at Ohio State by adding a minor in Hebrew to my curriculum. The minor combines both language and culture courses, so I’m really excited to beginning the minor next semester. I would love to go back to Israel and be able to communicate with the locals in their native tongue. All in all, I am learning to recognize that anything that makes me happy can be a path to a future career. When you find something you love, you should take it and run with it, and the rest will fall into place. I’m looking forward to continuing on my educational journey with this new mindset.
My G.O.A.L.S.
Global Awareness: I plan on studying abroad during my time at Ohio State at least once. I would like to take advantage of the Global May education abroad programs in particular that are offered here. The trip to Hungary interests me because I am half Hungarian, yet I don’t know very much about the country. Family is extremely important to me, and it’s very exciting that I could have an opportunity to connect with my roots as part of my education at Ohio State. I am also working on getting involved in the new Hebrew Club on campus. Hebrew is the foreign language I’m taking and I’m really enjoying it so far. I would love to connect with it more outside of the classroom by learning more in depth about Hebrew and Israeli culture outside the classroom.
Original Inquiry: I will participate in undergraduate research during my time here. Though I don’t know what I would want to research at this point and time, I know as I continue on my academic journey I will find a topic that will pique my interest. Once I am passionate about something, I will put my everything into it. For research, this means taking my findings to the next level and turning the project into a research thesis, as well as presenting my research at a research forum. I know where to find all of the steps to take to begin research and to get funding, and I am looking forward to the time in the near future that I am ready to put my plans into action.
Academic Enrichment: It has been slightly challenging to pick coursework for my professional interests because I am not totally sure what I want my future career to entail (or even really what I want my major/major(s) to be). But, I chose communications because of the many different ways it can be used in a multitude of careers. I am strongly considering adding on another major to this, I just don’t know exactly what it would be yet. On my academic plan I chose to pick the courses that interest me most, so I can try out many different areas of education to see if anything makes me excited and want to pursue it further. Many of my classes seem to lean towards the social-sciences as much as possible, which is an indicator for me of my interests. I’m specifically excited for Anthropology 5602 which is called Women’s Health in Global Perspective. This class seems like it will take my interest in health and look at it from a lens that I never have before, but it’s one that really excites me. I’m also looking forward to Sociology 1101H because it is a take on studying humans in a way that is new for me and I’m interested to see if I enjoy it. Additionally, I’m really loving my Hebrew class, and I’m considering taking on a minor in that even though minors aren’t required.
Leadership Development: I want to get involved with Greek life on-campus in January and not just be a member of a sorority, but get involved in leadership roles as soon as possible so I can make a difference in a group that I am passionate about. Furthermore, the Hillel at Ohio State has a plethora of opportunities to get involved from taking classes to learn more about Judaism to being an intern for them. I want to find an internship either during the school year or summer that helps me gain experience for my career path. There are so many opportunities to explore internships and I am starting as soon as possible to build up my resume. I also want to find more student organizations to get involved with at the second involvement fair in January, and take on a greater role in any organization I become a part of.
Service Engagement: Community service is very important to me. I want to look more into finding a service-oreineted student organization that I feel strongly about and get very involved in volunteering, fundraising, and advocating for the cause. Secondly, I would participate in any volunteering projects I hear about that are happening on or around campus. In addition, the Buck-I-SERVE trips seem like an incredible opportunity to make an impact domestically or abroad and I definitely want to participate in at least one trip during my time here. Anything anyone can do to make a difference really does matter, and it’s so important to help others who need it.