I attended the Breathe Hope service event in the Union on Thursday, November 15th. Breathe Hope is a club that raises money and gains support for people with cystic fibrosis, an incurable lung disease. They have a lot of events for people in the club throughout the semester, and also a lot of service events helping people with cystic fibrosis that are in the hospital. I know someone who has died from complications stemming from cystic fibrosis, so it made me productive to do something that helps people affected by the disease. In this case, we cut and tied blankets for patients in the hospital who have CF. It brought me a little comfort to know that the blankets I was making could bring someone who is suffering a little bit of comfort. It helped me realize that I want to incorporate service in any field I go into, and throughout every stage in my life. I also want to make service events like this more prevalent throughout my academic career, because it gave me a nice break from my weekly routine and was still productive. I’ve never done a service event that I didn’t directly help someone in need, and this it was refreshing to just be a nameless, faceless supporter. I have learned about genetic diseases before in some of my course work, but never specifically CF, so it was interesting to learn a little bit more about a disease that affects many young people. This topic relates to International Affairs because it’s a disease that affects people worldwide – not just in our own community. Although the blankets we made are for people in our community, the disease does not stay within Columbus city limits. The club also holds events that help people with CF across the nation, so it does not just target one demographic. Attending this event makes me wonder how many other clubs on campus there are that target a specific disease, and I wonder if they are all as popular as this one. It seems like this club has many members, but I think this is because CF affects a lot of people. I hope that the club has more events like this in the future, and I was thinking I should probably attend some more informative ones to better my understand of CF and how it manifests itself in people’s bodies. I think it’s especially interesting that CF is incurable, and is only made bearable by regular breathing treatments. I also was wondering if people in the club that I met have CF, and how their lives are affecting by having it along with being a University student. I would guess that it would depend on the severity of the disease, but having to walk all across campus seems like a daunting task with a lung disease. I also wonder if students with CF get accommodations. These are all questions I would ask the speaker had there been more time to talk, and if we weren’t just all making blankets.

The event I attended was the Undergraduate Research Festival. I visited multiple speakers and poster board, but the one that stuck out to me was a project about DNA mapping. I attended this on November 1, at 11:30. It was held in the Ohio Union, and had a few different facets to it. One part was the posterboard presentation, where participants just simply held an expo and presented their research to those who attended. Another part was the Oral presentations, which was a 10 minute presentation about their research project in front of an audience. The third aspect of the festival was the 3- minute thesis competition, in which participants created a slide and presented their research in 3 minutes or less – in lay terms only. There are then winners of that competition. The part I attended was the poster presentations. In the room. there were a considerable amount of presentations from a large variety of disciplines. This varied from dance, to education, to STEM. What surprised me was STEM research was not the clear majority, which I think is a common misconception. Most people believe that the majority of research is done in Science and the like, and that it is all laboratory based. Although this is true for a lot of the posters I encountered, it is definitely not true for all of them. There were education, psychological, and a variety of human and nonhuman based research. This relates to the topic of International Affairs because the projects were interdisciplinary and often related to life on a global level. Although I didn’t specifically see any projects that took place overseas, I’m sure they exist. Many of the projects I did see have global implications to their conclusions, and don’t just affect people in their immediate vicinity. From this event, I gained a lot of knowledge. Personally, I learned that research is pretty specific and that these students didn’t just have a general idea that they sought information about, they had a very specific hypothesis and a very specific way to research it. Professionally and academically, I learned that I would never want to do laboratory research, as it is incredibly tedious and although interesting information, pretty boring outcomes (to me). I think it would be a lot more fun to do field research, but would probably only participate if it fell on my lap, and probably wouldn’t seek it out. It seems like too big a time commitment. To be honest, I didn’t really learn much because of the IA community event where the research people came and spoke to us about research. The only thing I really learned was how crazy some people are for researching such tedious things.

I don’t have many questions about the event. The research the most stood out to me was a posterboard about genome and DNA mapping in amphibians that are almost identical, but this research proves they are not genetically identical, and that although they share many physical attributes, they differ, just slightly, in how they react to specific medications. This has pretty cool human implications, as it can affect cancer research in explaining how different people react to different medications.