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1. “Simple Man” – Crosby, Stills, and Nash
   • The line “I just want to hold you, I don’t want to hold you down. I hear what you’re saying, and you’re spinning my head around. And I can’t make it alone,” I feel like perfectly describes me as a person. I just want to be with people. I don’t want to hold the people I love down, I just want to spend time with them. I rely on them; I depend on them. I don’t really think I could make it alone. But I don’t really think anyone should ever have to.
2. “Homeward Bound” – Marta Keen
   • “If you find it’s me you’re missing, if you’re hoping I’ll return, to your thoughts I’ll soon be listening, in the road I’ll stop and turn.” This song used to make me cry every time I heard it, because I felt that the person that I missed would never care, or realize how much I did. But listening to it again, it gives me hope that the person I’m missing knows I’m missing them, and that maybe they’ll eventually be homeward bound. Thinking about it more, it also has a profound effect on me because of where I am in life; trying to figure out if my true “home” is at school in Columbus, or back with my family and the majority of my friends in Indiana.
3. “In My Life” – The Beatles
   • The past few years of my life have seemed like a rollercoaster. This song reminds me that all of my memories have their place. Just because something has passed, or someone has left, doesn’t mean you never cared about them or that the time you spent with them didn’t matter. “In my life, I’ve loved them all.” At many points in my life, I have hated my memories because they seemed corrupted by the realities of the present. This song reminds me that I loved them at one point, though, and that that’s all that really matters.
4. “Your Arms Around Me” – Jens Lekman
   • “What’s broken can always be fixed, what’s fixed can always be broken,” is one of my absolute favorite lyrics from a song that’s in one of my absolute favorite movies. It gives me hope that things that have turned sour can be sweet again. That being said, it is also a reminder not to take advantage of the good things in my life. Just because something is good in one moment doesn’t mean it couldn’t fall apart the next. Appreciate what you have while its there.
5. “Blackbird” – The Beatles
   • This song holds an incredibly special place in my heart for a number of reasons. “Take these broken wings and learn to fly.” I love the idea that you can still learn to fly again, even thought your wings have been broken. I think the operative word here is “learn.” I think it’s easy to feel like you should be able to pick yourself up easily after being broken, but its not. You have to learn how to function all over again, and that takes time, and that is okay.
6. “I Miss the Mountains” – Next to Normal
   • It is one of my dreams to play Diana in this musical. Though this song is about her struggle with trying to treat bipolar disorder and hallucinations of her dead son, I feel like it applies to how I have found myself feeling at certain points in my life. I am someone that desperately seeks to feel everything as deeply as possible, which sometimes can actually be harmful. But when I feel as if I am depersonalized, and not experiencing the world around me, this is the song that reminds me of what I am missing.
7. “You Still Believe in Me” – The Beach Boys
   • I fell in love with this song and its insane harmonies after watching “Love and Mercy”, one of my current favorite movies, about Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys. Its hard to put into words why I love this song. The harmonies blow my mind every time, and its just a visceral, vulnerable, truthful piece of music that I can’t help but love.
8. “Lullaby (Goodnight, My Angel)” – Billy Joel
   • My dad sang this to me when I was little, and it will always be one of my favorite songs. And I will sing it to my children if I have any. “I think I know what you’ve been asking me, I think you know what I’ve been trying to say.” My dad and I may not always be on the same page, but he’ll always be my dad.
9. “From God’s Perspective” – Bo Burnham
   • This song is definitely intended to be a comedic critique of organized religion, but I find myself agreeing with nearly everything in it. It becomes surprisingly poignant towards the end, and describes how I feel about faith, when it says “Maybe life on Earth could be Heaven, doesn’t just the thought of it make it worth a try. My love’s the type of thing that you have to earn, and when you earn it you won’t need it. I’m not gonna give you love just ’cause I know that you want me to. If you want love then the love’s gonna come from you.” I don’t know if I necessarily believe in God, but I know I believe in love.

Reflecting on the past class about StrengthsQuest, I think the concept that stuck most with me was the idea of harnessing your strengths to help improve your weaknesses. The Strengths specialist gave the example of his boss utilizing his empathy in order to make him better at getting paperwork submitted on time and legibly. Rather than simply telling him to do better, he had him look at it in terms of its effects on other people, how him not doing his job well made other people’s jobs harder to do. I found this example very interesting in how strengths can be important to know about colleagues to help tasks get accomplished the most efficiently and effectively.

I will use my first strength, input, in the rest of my college career in many ways. Input means that I enjoy learning. I have found this to be incredibly true in my past education. I honestly did not enjoy a lot of my classes in high school because I didn’t truly feel like I was learning anything new. Even with some of my introductory classes in college, I have found that much of the information seems somewhat common knowledge to me, or perhaps redundant of previous courses. However, I will use my input strength, particularly in scheduling classes, to pick classes that I think will call upon that strength the most and help me learn completely new concepts and ideas. I have found that I am most excited about education when I feel like I’m really learning something new.

My second strength, deliberative, suggests that I am very careful and thoughtful in my decision making. Sometimes, I have found that I am almost deliberative to an excess, which leads to indecisiveness. I will try to use my deliberative quality as I approach the next few years in planning as much as possible for the road ahead, in terms of classes and personal projects and interests, as well as future jobs and opportunities. I will use my deliberative strength to plan what I can, but I will keep in mind the fact that things don’t always go according to plan, and I will be prepared for whatever comes at me.

My third strength, woo, stands for “winning over others.” I honestly am rather unsure of my ability to do this. I think that I am aware that I can do it, but I often allow my deliberative strength to overshadow my woo, and make myself somewhat closed off to others. Since coming to school, I have honestly surprised myself very much in how much more introverted I have become. I think it has been more out of necessity than anything. Therefore, in the upcoming years, I will use my woo to really help me make some good, close friends, so that I don’t feel as if my entire support group is back in Indiana. I think that will help me with the many adjustments that come with this time in life; having a good group of close friends that I can lean on when it gets hard, and celebrate with when its going great.

StrengthsQuest Results

1. Input
2. Deliberative
3. Woo
4. Command
5. Communication

Strengths Reflection

Input: The first line in the Strengths Insight Report about this strength as it pertains to me, is “Driven by your talents, you seek the company of individuals whose vocabulary is esoteric — that is, understood by only a specialized group.” This immediately stood out to me as being completely accurate. One recent situation in which I saw this strength prevailing, was just in my last class, Intro to Theatre. We had a guest lecturer from the theatre department come in and talk about media design. He used a few references to artists I learned about in high school classes, and a few words that I knew I was probably one of few in the audience to understand, and I felt myself learning more from his lecture because I understood more of his words. Reading the Personalized Strengths Insight, I am almost dumbfounded by how accurate the description of Input is as my greatest strength.

Deliberative: In this instance, the line from the Strengths Insight Report that I felt applied most to my life was. “The quality of your relationships is much more important to you than the number of people who say you are their friend.” I have always known this to be true of me. Despite the fact that I am incredibly extraverted, I have never felt like I have had a multitude of friends, but instead, a few incredibly close ones. And I prefer it that way. For instance, at the moment, I know I have a good number of “friends” who are more surface-level acquaintances, but I can count on one hand my closest friends and the people I truly trust. I also found the aspect of this strength about preferring honesty to flattery to be incredibly true to me. One situation I have found this arise frequently is when I am asked to edit papers. I often mutilate much of the piece with red ink, no matter whose paper it is, and very rarely offer up a ton of compliments. I am always striving to make things the best they can be.

Woo: “Because of your strengths, you feel forlorn — that is, miserable or deprived — when you are separated from someone who is dear to you. You yearn to spend time with your friends. Their absence saddens you.” I think this excerpt from the Strengths Insight Report is the most applicable to my life, in my current situation as a freshman in college, three hours away from home and some of my best friends. I find myself rather constantly missing my two best friends, Shawn and Mallie, who are both three hours away. Knowing that this would probably be the case was actually one of the reasons I chose to come to Ohio State, instead of somewhere further away. While I love it here, and love meeting new people and “introducing myself to outsiders and newcomers,” as this strength would suggest, I also find myself very sad not being able to spend all my time with my closest friends.

For this project, I was paired up with someone I had never met before. Upon first impression, I wasn’t sure we would have much in common, but I was excited to see how the project would go because I’ve always loved the idea of expressing a person’s personality through a visual image or artistic piece.

To get to know each other, we went online and found a personality questionnaire and just started asking each other questions back and forth, back and forth. I found out that she is a Culinary Science major with a minor in French. I learned that she dreams of solving world hunger, and plans to attempt to do her part by starting her own health food company based off of the idea of Toms Shoes, in which, for every item purchased, one is sent to someone in need.

I learned that, like me, she can be very indecisive. We also share a love of spending time with friends, and an anxiety about being alone. She enjoys experimenting in the kitchen, discovering ways to make delicious recipes fit her vegan lifestyle, and working out, doing yoga. I also learned that we share a love of The Office and New Girl.

She’s a quirky girl, someone who laughs at everything, one of those “happy people,” in her words. She loves Jane Austen books and movies, particularly Pride and Prejudice, because she knows it will have a happy ending. She plays ukulele and enjoys spending her time at a coffee shop or bookstore, somewhere where she can be surrounded by art and people.

When I asked her what the most important lesson she’s learned in her life so far, she said “learning that the world’s problems aren’t all on my shoulders, and if I worry too much about fixing them, I’ll go crazy.” She is a big proponent of doing everything you can, but this lesson taught her not to neglect herself in the process.

I thought that this picture captured her quirkiness. The setting and the colors are parallels with her love of nature and living simply and naturally, while the punch of red emphasizes her passion for her goals and her beliefs. She is barefoot, content in her place, with her instrument, and a smile on her face.

[Artifacts are the items you consider to be representative of your academic interests and achievements. For each entry, include both an artifact and a detailed annotation.  An annotation is a reflective description of the artifact that attempts to communicate its significance.  For more information, go to: http://honors-scholars.osu.edu/e-portfolio. Delete these instructions and add your own post.]