Campus Resource

Rewind it back to Saturday, October 5. I’m feeling a bit sick (it started around Thursday) so I stay in bed until about 3:00 in the afternoon, when I finally move around to eat. The Buckeyes are playing the Michigan State Spartans this evening; naturally, as a ticket holder, I go to the game, and disregarded the slight headache and sore throat I had prior to going to the game. My friends and I arrived to the game late, but nothing of importance really hapened in the game so far. I stayed there until about the beginning of the third quarter, when I started getting chills and began feeling worse. I went back to my room and took some medicine. I ended up sleeping at 10:00 after advice from my floormate telling me to go to bed after being in his room (which was at room temperature) with a winter jacket. I woke up at 1:00 in the morning since I had more than enough sleep in the morning and was not tired at all when I went to bed. Essentially my cold got worse as I tossed and turned in bed for a few hours trying to put myself to sleep as I felt hot and cold at the same time.

The next morning was even worse. My throat got even worse; I was coughing; I had a fever and I felt like I was going to die. So after talking it with my friends, I made an appointment for Monday (Sunday’s appointments were already full). I went after class, and while most of the symptoms went away by that time, I still was a bit under the weather. I talked to a doctor, and she gave me some medicine and I received a piece of paper saying that I went to the Student Health Center. I didn’t use it to get out of classes though, since I already felt good enough to go to class.

Looking back at the experience, I felt like the whole process went very smoothly. I went to the information desk and confirmed that I would be seeing a doctor, I got called, and I left with what I wanted. However, the process would have been a lot harder had I gone when I was at my worst during the cold. My only complaint (which is a nitpick to be honest) is that it is a bit far away, and that CVS is right by Houston so it is far more convenient to go there instead.

In general, Ohio State offers many services to its students. Unfortunately, I believe that most of these services are overlooked by most of the student body as there isn’t much information about them unless they are looked up online. The Student Health Center is a more popular resource, but I’m sure that there are many other services that I and other students could be taking advantage of if I knew about them. I guess it’s just that there’s so many of them it’s almost impossible for people to know all of the services offered by Ohio State.

Inside of the Health Center

The Student Health Center building. I Went back to take these pictures for this assignment.

STEM Seminar

This past Thursday, Nick suddenly asked me on if I was free from 4 o’clock to 5 o’clock. It was right after I was coming back from class. I said yes, although it was right in between the time when I was free from classes (my class ended at 3:50 and I go to the next one at 5:10). He reminded me that this ePortfolio post was due and there was a seminar was coming up (which he was going to), so I tagged along to be able to write this post.

We went to Scott Lab and went to see Matheiu Vrard’s seminar on “Determination of the evolutionary states of red giant stars through the use of seismology.” He was introduced by one of the astronomy professors here at Ohio State as a graduate student from France. In the seminar, there were quite a few undergraduate students there; I recognized almost all of them since they were also STEM scholars. Because of this, I did not feel too out of place in about a dozen graduate students and adults who also attended the seminar. However, I did get a sense that the seminar would be hard to comprehend, to say the least, as the age of the people attending gave an indication to the seminar’s “level of difficulty.”

As expected, the seminar went over my head (and presumably every other STEM scholar’s head, even if they were astronomy majors) as soon as it began. Coming into the seminar, I knew that red giants are essentially very big stars; much bigger than our Sun. I learned that they have exhausted their hydrogen cores and therefore are on their last breath of their life. That was about it for my knowledge about red giants. I used to be interested in astronomy until my parents unsubscribed from the National Geographic Kids magazine, whereafter my interested in astronomy slowly faded away as I moved to the States. In any case, the rest of the seminar was all Greek to me (technically it was just English with a French accent), partially because of his accent, partially because of my distance to the speaker, but mostly because the information was, in the most literal sense, years ahead of anybody’s knowledge of astronomy.

There was something I found fascinating about the seminar, looking back to it. It was that while I did not understand almost any of the information that was spoken to me in its entirety, I was intrigued for the whole presentation. It was incomprehensible, but knowing that we as humanity have gone this far in understanding these planets, some that are millions or even billions of light years from Earth, amazed me. Mr. Vrard’s presentation may have been nothing out of the ordinary; his content may have been known to all graduate astronomy students.  Even still, the intellect he showed on the subject and the passion that he carried for what he researched carried me to listen to him. I came out of the seminar with almost nothing comprehended about the topic; I should have asked questions like some of the guests present for the seminar. However, it was a worthwhile seminar in my experience.

I do believe that there is great merit for those who are active in the academic community, even as an undergraduate student. These seminars intrigue me and it would probably be even more interesting to me if it was one that was closer to my major. Going to these seminars and talking to the presenters and making your presence be known to them can be a great way to start a network with professionals that never would have crossed my sight had I not been active.

The presentation and me