During this project I learned a lot about my skill at the game of poker and how much I still need to learn.  The project started out as me attempting to learn the heads up portion of a poker match where the last two remaining participates of a tournament must play in a high stakes lightning round version of the game.  However, after believing that I had the fundamentals of the regular game of poker down, I had a rude awakening once the competition increased in difficulty.  I found myself having extreme issues just getting to heads up, and when I did, I would lose within seconds to the other player.  I realized that poker is not just about the cards in your hand, it is about your position on the table and when your turn is during the hand.  If you are the last person to play and you have nothing, you can still win the hand with a huge bluff, forcing every other player to fold or call a large amount.  When you are in the final position you are most likely to win the hand compared to if you are in the first position.  If you bet a large amount in the first position, many of the players will see the bluff and call.  However, if you are in the final position, other players have already thrown some of their chips in the pot and may not be willing to give anymore for fear of losing their entire stack.  They will most likely fold as a consequence.  I also learned that in online games of poker, blinds increase extremely fast and can quickly overwhelm you if you are trying to play conservative and slow.  The solution is to tactically go all in, when you have good positioning and a good hand to pick up the large blinds from the other players.  Just watch out for people in front of you doing the same thing.  If you have a good hand, then call but if not, fold instantly.  I feel that due to my inexperience, I was not yet cut out for the fast paced stress of heads up, and I should focus instead on learning the true fundamentals of the game before I search for harder players and game types.  It is because of these failures that I feel that I have actually improved as a player.  Thankfully, I had my dad holding me accountable for my actions in the games and teaching me as I made mistakes which was helpful in determining my limits at this time.  If I were to do anything differently, it would have been to start smaller.  I feel like I bit off a little more than I could chew when I tried to specifically learn the hardest part of poker after only a small amount of practice.  If I had realized that my techniques were far outclassed by everyone, I would have started to improve my basic skills for this project instead.  However, after coming to this conclusion I was able to make a lot of progress and I was even able to earn a spot in a large tournament from a satellite match I played in.  Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come.

For my honors and scholars ten hour project, I am planning on mastering the hardest the hardest thing to play in a poker match; heads up.  Heads up is when the last two remaining players in a poker tournament try to out match each other in an almost lightning round style version of the game they were just participating in.  At this point, blinds are extremely high and can dwindle your chip stack if you try to play it safe.  You can also be caught completely off guard by your opponent and have all of your chips vanish if you decide to play aggressive.  There must be a delicate balance between slow paced tactics and well timed aggression if you want to win.  However, if you get unlucky, it only takes one hand to bring an end to your tournament dreams.  The reason I must master this area of the game is because I won my first ever poker tournament due to forfeit from the other two players at the table.  We never truly made it to a heads up scenario.  A rare occurrence that I never expect to happen again.  For this reason and more, I should prepare myself for more possible tournaments to come.

Last week I was able to attend one of the first year success series events called Surviving College 101.  The reason I am using this for my diversity post is because I feel that having emotional issues with college is something that affects all students at the Ohio State University.  I felt that going to this event would help me with my self-confidence.  When I arrived the crowd was rather small, but the populous was quite diverse which backs up my claim from before.  The speaker was great, she got us involved in hands-on activities, and she spiced up conversations with stories from her past to keep us interested.  I ended up leaving with more self-confidence then I had going in and I hope this result was similar for the others at the seminar.  However, this got me thinking about the people who needed that seminar and did not attend.  I know the campus is very large and there are very many students in my freshman class.  I also know that some of the people in the freshman class were not able to grow up with some of the privileges that I had.  There past could have made them stronger and able to handle hardships easier, or it could have the opposite affect and make them very emotionally fragile.  That is were the incredible community of The Ohio State University comes in.  There are so many clubs dedicated to each race, gender, or sexuality that it should be rather easy for a struggling college student to find a community where they feel like they can fit in and have a good time.  There are also a massive amount of classes taught at the university that cover a vast variety religions and cultures where people like me can be exposed to new societal ideals and lifestyles.  I feel that diversity can also impact STEM in a multitude of ways.  Mainly, the simple act of sharing a new idea about a topic can vary between people based on their different lifestyles.  Contribution to a project might affected the same way.  A person who has most likely lived a rather calm and privileged life might be interested in projects that make peoples lives easier.  This may differ for a person who grew up in a rather rough community.  They might be more interested in projects like relief efforts for poor countries and communities by finding ways to transport food, water, and shelters to people in need.  In fact this is another area where the Ohio State University can help out.  Specifically, the Department of Food and Agricultural Engineering has been helping with these relief efforts.  I went to another seminar this afternoon where the speaker had been able to travel to third world countries to experience their culture and living conditions.  He was appalled that so many people could live without reliable supplies of food and water.  So he made it a top priority to influence incoming generations of college students to take action and fix this dire situation.  I feel that diversity is not only necessary for student inclusion at the university, but also to make sure new ideas can be represented and used to take action against the problems of today.

I was not really forced to go to an campus resource because of this post.  I had actually visited my academic adviser rather early in the year when she had open office hours.  However, this is the only campus resource that I have visited so far besides the medical center.  Like I said before, I first visited my academic adviser during her open office hours to talk about dropping a class so it was rather easy to get into the room to talk to her.  But when I went back the next time, the open office hours had ended and I could only see her by appointment.  I needed to talk to her about some issues with my confidence in my physics class and how it was making me feel, but her next available appointment was a week later.  When I got to my appointment I also found out that I had been assigned a different adviser that would be meeting with me.  It ended up working out fine in the end, but the first part meeting was quite awkward and uncomfortable for me.  Thankfully, when I went back today to set up another meeting, there was an available time slot for tomorrow making it easier for me to remember all of the questions I want to ask.  From my previous experiences going to this resource, I hoped to gain knowledge on campus topics that I was unfamiliar with given the fact that it is my first year as well as improving my mental health and increasing my confidence by getting a second opinion on actions that I planned on making.  So far, all of my questions and concerns have been helpfully answered.  However, I do feel that there is room for improvement in this service.  My one issue is how overworked each the advisers are.  Each adviser looks after about four hundred and fifty students each, which is the main reason why the appointment times are so backed up.  Recently, my adviser had to tend to an emergency at home which created the massive backup that I mentioned earlier.  Obviously, this could not be avoided and she needed some time off, but I feel that if there were more advisers in the service, the workload on each would be greatly decreased and would insure that everything stays together when one needs to take off work for something important.  One service I feel that campus needs is one that assists people who have severe food allergies.  I have lived my whole life affected by allergies to dairy and eggs and it is the main reason why I commute to campus instead of living on it.  But what if a person with food allergies from a far away state came to Ohio State.  The simple action of going to lunch everyday would be equivalent to walking over a mine field without the support of the people who have helped them over the years.  That is where my created campus resource comes in.  Someone that can provide the person with reports of the safest restaurants to eat at and which ones are the most accommodating and compliant when asked to adapt an order.  I hope to discover many other campus resources during my time at OSU because even with the few that I have been to already my confidence has vastly improved when looking towards the future.

Over my years in high school there have been obvious ways to get help when I had issues with my classes.  Each of my teachers were all willing and ready to assist with my questions almost every day of the week.  They were also very easy to find because each teacher I had was stuck in one building.  I would spend just a few minutes looking for them if they were not in their usual place, so asking questions was never a stressful experience.  Since coming to Ohio State, help has been less abundant and even harder to find.  Of course I go to office hours with my lecture professors and TA’s.  However, each one has their own set times that I need to memorize and they are all located in different buildings.  Sometimes they are in buildings that I have never seen before, so I waste about twenty minutes just trying to find their office.  In one of these trips, the professor was not even willing to help me.  He was frustrated the second I walked in, and after about ten minutes was close to forcing me out of the room.  This left me feeling somewhat desperate and alone.  That is when I discovered the Yonkin Success Center.  A quite place to study and do homework, and from 7:00 to 9:00 Pm holds small tutoring sessions for Math, Physics, and Chemistry.  The first day I went was before a math exam which would take place the next day.  I knew most of the material going in, I just wanted to get a benchmark on what kind of help I would receive.  In this tutoring room, there were a small amount of upperclassmen assisting quite a few underclassmen like me who had questions about the upcoming test.  What I personally appreciated about the experience was that the upperclassman that talked to me was equipped with a white board.  I would ask a question about a problem and he would answer it on this white board, showing me his work as he did it which helped me immensely since I am more of a visual learner.  That night I left with more confidence and knowledge than I had going in and I was sure that I was going to crush that exam.  Based on the experiences that I have had with academic tutoring in the past and the present, they have certainly helped me to better understand topics that I was struggling with.  I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say with almost complete certainty that every student could improve their participation and grades in a class by getting outside assistance.  However, based on where my confidence has been on certain topics over the years like Calculus and Physics; at this moment I don’t believe that I am cut out to be an academic coach.  Maybe in a few years, my confidence in these topics will improve and I may be of some assistance to incoming freshman.  But I need receive some more academic coaching myself if I want to obtain the ability to help others out of the stressful situations I have found myself in.

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