I’m currently a couple of months out following my sophomore year, and these past 2 semesters I have made a lot of progress in deepening my interests and commitments in both my academics, my student organizations, and my future plans.
Academically, the most major change I have made over the past year was adding a second major in Geography. I chose to do this because the International Studies department doesn’t have a formal “department” in that it is more of a compilation of classes from other departments. So, I wanted to have more of a “home base,” especially since I am beginning to get involved with research. I chose geography because a few of my international studies classes have been taught by geography professors, and I really enjoyed those classes. I definitely made the right choice, because I am currently loving my geography classes and I am starting to get involved in research in the department.
As for my student organizations, I have increased my commitment to Nourish International, the club that I joined during freshman year and went to Peru with last summer. Our organization has taken a somewhat new direction as we are now focusing on local service partnerships rather than international opportunities, and it was a great experience to be part of the executive board during this transition. We have started working with a local community garden, the Charles Madison Nabrit Memorial Garden, and over the past year, we had the chance to visit the garden a few times and donate a couple of thousand dollars that we raised through various fundraisers. This coming year, I will be serving as one of two co-presidents for the organization, so I’m really looking forward to continuing to develop our new partnership and create more opportunities for Nourish to give back to the Columbus community.
Another organization that I am involved with is The Right Click, our Eminence class service project. Since starting from scratch at the beginning of freshman year, we have come a long way in refining The Right Click’s mission and putting our plan into action. What started out as a project to spread technological literacy through an education program has now evolved into a plan to fight technological access disparities and promote sustainability at the same time. We do this by hosting technology drives where people can bring in their old computers, phones, and other products, and then we take the collected items and either refurbish and donate them or recycle them if they are no longer usable. This past year, we hosted two drives, one in the fall and one in the spring. We saw a massive increase in donations between the two drives, and our next step is going to be refurbishing all our donations and finding a useful way to donate them. We are also going to start expanding our organization to include members from outside the Eminence program, in order to make sure that our project will continue to thrive after we graduate.
As far as my summer plans, it is now about halfway through summer and I recently returned from a month-long study abroad trip to Cyprus where I took a course called Geography of the European Union. I wrote about it more in depth in a post in the G.O.A.L.S. section of my ePortfolio, which you can find here. Additionally, I will be traveling to Belize in a few weeks to work on a project that I am doing under the supervision of one of my geography professors, Dr. Joel Wainwright. The trip will be a combination of research and service learning as I will be working in a Garifuna community to both learn more about their unique culture and help them preserve it by contributing to the creation of a cultural museum. I’m very excited for this first step into getting involved with research, and I think it will help me start off in a good place so that I can hit the ground running once school starts again.