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.