One event that I attended was a lecture called “Are Democracies Dying?”. It was held on Friday, September 13th in Thompson Library. The event was categorized as an Academic and I think I was able to learn so much new information from it. This lecture really impacted me in many ways. The lecturer, Dr. Steven Levitsky, mentioned that the Trump Administration has had the worst record of diplomatic outreach since the Nixon administration. Our current president has embraced autocratic leaders more than any other president and has in a sense neglected to promote democracy. However, despite this neglect, the number of true democracies in the world in the past 20 years has actually remained quite constant. In fact, the percentage of democracies has only gone down from 46% to 45%. Ever since the fall of the USSR, more developing countries have turned to democracy to rebuild, and democracy has been continuously promoted around the world. The main point of this lecture was that democracies are not currently dying, but we have to do our best to save them or things could go wrong in the future. This event impacted me a lot and made me think about democracy as an essiental value to our American perspective, and showed me how International Affairs could be essiental to the real world. I gained a new perspective on why I joined the IA group and what all of our actions could mean for the rest of the world.
Month: September 2019
IA Scholars Cookout
The event that I attended was the Smith-Steeb Scholars cookout. It was a social event and was meant to build community within the IA scholars group and among the other scholars programs living in our dorm. I feel like through this event, I really learned a lot about the community that our scholars programs provide. It was very early in the school year, and since things were still very fresh at OSU it was really awesome to be able to connect to those who shared common academic interests with me and those who had completely different interests from me. I was able to meet so many of the IA people that I hadn’t met and a lot of the other scholars people as well. I think that this event actually did teach me a lot about international affairs in a weird way. While it doesn’t seem directly related, a lot of what we learn about in the IA scholars group is community building and bridging gaps that occur in our everyday lives. Also, part of the benefit of the IA scholars group is that we are such a diverse group of people who have varied interests and getting to talk to so many new people and learn their stories. I think I was able to grow a lot personally from this event by meeting so many new people and adjusting more to life at OSU.
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