For my spring project I decided to learn how to ice skate. I have only been ice skating one time before and all I remember was falling down a lot so I think it would be nice to be able to go and stay up for a while. Some of my friends have asked me to go skating and play hockey before and I haven’t gone with them yet so hopefully once I learn I will be more willing to go. I plan on going to some of the open skate sessions that OSU puts on with maybe someone that has an idea what they are doing in order to improve.

For the diversity event I went to the STEM diversity and inclusion event. Before I went to the event I was slightly worried about attending because I wasn’t exactly sure what I should of been expecting from it. I wouldn’t say I am very familiar with diversity and inclusion efforts but I am also not completely blind as to what goes on around me. I have heard some of the stories of what some of my friends have had to go through before coming to OSU as well and problems that have happened here as well. The feeling of nervousness about the event probably stemmed from the fact that I feel that I have had a very privileged life so I haven’t had to go through the same trials and ordeals as my peers around me.

The event itself was informative but at the same time it felt like I have heard the same information repeated back to me in my other classes such as my survey classes. It was also awkward at times when no one on either side of the room so you just had the same five people responding to questions or reading responses off of the board. I found some of the things that are considered to be kinds of privilege surprising mostly because I never really thought about them in the past. For example one of the examples the speaker gave was how many books we had in our house growing up and I never really thought that there are plenty of people out there that didn’t have the same access to reading that I did. Another one that was interesting to me was attractiveness, which I am slightly still confused about since people can have different ideas of what makes someone attractive. I feel the most important point I learned from the event was that it doesn’t help for me to just feel sorry or bad for people that didn’t have the same privileges that I had but you should use it to go out of your way and try to help in some way, even just spreading knowledge about it can be beneficial since some are safer when giving their opinions.

For the STEM field I think it’s important that we consider the impact we have on inclusion. I feel STEM has a preconceived notion that it’s more of a male dominated field so it’s important to show that’s not the case anymore. I can’t really speak for my classmate or friends for how diversity affects them but for me it’s hard to relate to others that different upbringings than me since we don’t necessarily share the same privileges that I had. For the university I feel there are options for people to go out and learn about how important diversity and inclusion is but these are just optional and not all students will take advantage of these programs so the campus does offer enough resources pertaining to diversity and inclusion it’s just wether or not students choose to use them ore not. During the event I didn’t have any of my beliefs challenged but I do feel that a lot of the students that were there were afraid to speak because most of us didn’t want to say something wrong and accidentally offend someone.

When I discovered that I had to visit a non academic campus resource I was slightly worried about figuring out which resource I would use. I didn’t really feel the need to utilize some of the resources that OSU offers me and others I don’t know if I would feel comfortable writing about. I knew a little about the student wellness center as well as the career center and I knew about the escort service but did not see the need to use it myself. Some of the resources offered I had no idea existed such as Multicultural center or the office of internal affairs. It wasn’t hard to find these resources all you had to do was google them and you could just find an open time for your schedule.

For my non-academic campus resource I attended a first year success series. The series that I went to was titled Food, Sleep, and Exercise strategies for Mental health. I chose this one because I thought it be beneficial to learn better strategies to eating healthier as well as developing a good work out schedule In this success series I learned how important is it to not only eat the recommended amount of calories for yourself but that for most food groups we are either under consuming or over consuming. This is important because we need to consume these at healthy levels so it doesn’t just affect us physically but mentally as well. The speaker gave us websites such as tdeecalculator which can be helpful to see what you specifically need to intake to stay healthy. He also suggested the student wellness center would help you come up with a diet plan in order to have a more personalized plan. I believe that this series is important to to have because it can be helpful for students to know the negative effects that not eating healthy can have on your mind. It also gives students some solutions on how to snack healthier and not fall behind in meals.

At the end of the lecture I was slightly disappointed with the experience. Going into it I expected the speaker to give more helpful strategies to eating healthier. Most of the advice he gave revolved the students getting food from outside of campus and as a student who is paying for a meal plan it seems kind of stupid to waste money on groceries when we can just get food on campus. It was also disappointing for the fact that he mostly only talked about the food aspect, I was hoping for him to go into more depth about the sleep strategies as well as exercise plans. I have two other success series scheduled to go to. One of them is titled the Art of Allowing: Letting go of perfectionism, and I don’t really see myself as a perfectionist anymore but I hope to find goal setting strategies to better manage my time. The other one I am going to is career exploration and this one should help me find suitable career according to my interests.

I decided to go to the Determination of the evolutionary states of red giant stars through the use of seismology and it was given by Mathieu Vrard. This seminar was the most interesting sounding to me since I thought about majoring in astronomy in the past and took an astronomy class in high school so I thought I would be able to understand some parts of the lecture. I almost went by myself since all of my friends had class at the time of the presentation but I found one of my friends on his way back to the dorm and was able to convince him to go with me. There were some people there that I recognized, most likely there just not fulfill the requirements for the STEM reflection but I would say the rest of the people were grad students. No one there really talked to each other. I interacted with some of the other STEM students there but we didn’t really talk about what was going on in the seminar.

The content in the seminar itself went way over my head. In the beginning I understood some aspects of what he was saying because he started by talking about what separated red giants from other stars and I already knew some of these qualities. However, once he got more into the presentation the less and less I began to understand. At one point he started taking about helium flash and I had no clue what was this about I kind of just lost interest.  It was even hard to follow the slides because most of the time I didn’t really know what I was looking at. The presentation was obviously geared more towards graduate students that show interest in that area of study and probably not suited for undergrads who has limited knowledge in astronomy. It is difficult to say that I learned anything from this seminar since I didn’t understand most of the information in the session but I would say I learned more about measurement methods of red giants.

I believe that being involved in the academic community as an undergraduate student. It is important to start getting involved early into your college career so you can open yourself up to more opportunities. The more events you attend the more people you can meet and they can give you advice or even offers to help them with their careers. I didn’t find the information from the seminar I went to that helpful but the experience itself was helpful and now I know more of what I should expect. If I went to a seminar that I knew more about or just simpler to understand it might of allowed me to interact more with the speaker himself as well as the other students there. Seminars can also be used to find possible interest for you. If you go to a lecture thinking you are really passionate about a subject and find that you find no interest them maybe the subject isn’t for you. All in all I don’t think attending seminars are a waste of time even if it’s in your area of study.

A few times throughout the year I have visited the math help center, MSLC. I went a couple times in the first 2 weeks in order to get help with reviewing some of the algebra concepts for calc 1 since its been a couple months since I have done any math. Also visited MSLC before my first midterm in order to review some topics I was unfamiliar with. It wasn’t too hard going to find help for math, the professor and TA both mentioned it plenty of times and multiple emails were sent out about it. I feel that some people have a stigma about getting help and are afraid that just because they need help people may judge them but I don’t find this being the case. A lot of the time it just shows you are willing to put yourself out there in order to learn something that you might not know that well. I asked for help in other subjects before in high school like french as well as getting tutored in order to do better on the SAT and the ACT. This is the only resource I have used in College but this is because Calc 1 is the only class I am really struggling with right now. Help seeking is a very valuable tool in order to do well in life. Asking for help is an important way to gain knowledge from people have more experience and more knowledge in the field. I fell that students that seek help will do better in school because they are getting the information straight from the source and therefore can be more accurate with their answers. I went to MSLC in order to get help on questions about reviewing algebra. When I first showed up it wasn’t too crowded and there were plenty of tutors already there. Getting help was fairly easy all I had to do was put up a sign and a tutor would come to the table and ask what you needed help with. I did the majority of the homework before I went so I didn’t spend too long there since I only had at most 5 questions. The tutor was extremely helpful and knew exactly what she was doing. She made sure to not just do the work for me but to tell me where to start and from there I pretty much got it down. The worst one was where I didn’t know how to do a problem at all but all I had to do was look at the previous graph to know where to start. I don’t know if I would be able to tutor in college. In high school I got an award for tutoring in my PreCalc class but I feel that I don’t have enough knowledge in any subject in college to be qualified to tutor. I thought about tutoring younger kids but the problem with that is that I don’t have much experience with working with kids that are younger than me. I will probably have to go to tutoring for French in the future since I have not taken it since Sophomore year and still need to take one more semester to fulfill my degree.

Block O

These past two home football games I have been a part of Block O. This is pretty much just the crazy student section of the games, and every college/high school has one. I was never part of the one we had at my high school, which we called the rowdy crowd, so it is a different way for me to experience the football games. My seat just happened to be in the section of it so if you count that as joining then that’s how I joined. The first meeting we had was Buckeye Kickoff  and it was pretty much what one could of expected where they just teach you all the different chants and when to make an “O”. I went with a couple of friends from my floor so I knew some people there so it wasn’t too awkward. The benefit of being a port of this group is the sense of unity you get when at one of the games. you can just be as loud as you want and know that the person next to you is going to do the same thing. It’s also a good way to get to know other people since you sit pretty much in the same place for games so you can get to know the people around you. Block O doesn’t really have set leaders like other organizations do, I would say that most of the upperclassmen are leaders there mostly just because they have been their before and know what’s going on. There’s not much time management skills required for this group because it is all during gamedays so as long you finish your work before or after the games depending when they are you should be fine. You could also choose to not go if you are really busy so there is not a lot of scheduling conflicts. For interacting with other people at Block O it has been pretty hit or miss so far. When I went to the first meeting I went with friends I knew and we talked a bit with the other students sitting around us, and the first game there were plenty of fun people around me that I talked to and shared some interests. But the second game the people around pretty much only had their cliques they were in so it was harder to find people to interact with and get to know better. It can be hard sometimes to find clubs and orgs that fit certain interests you have sometimes, most of them seem to already have set standards for what they want to do so it would be hard to change that. A couple of friends and I have talked about creating our own club a couple times. We don’t really know what it would be about but we thought about topics such as Jeopardy or Euchre. I feel that the large amount of students and orgs can seem like a good thing since that just means you have a large variety of different options available for you to choose from, but this also contributes to the fact that I can be intimidating to join some orgs or groups because you feel out of place.