I have encountered many changes in my personal and academic life throughout my time at Ohio State and with the International Affairs Scholars program. Though I came into Ohio State with an International Studies major and have never changed it, I have faced changes in course in terms of career options and immediate future after college. In my personal life, I was forced to become much more self-reliant in terms of emotion and future plans at the beginning of this year, and because of these changes, I have become more confident in my decisions and more willing to trust myself than I was prior to this growth. In terms of career, I have waffled between options that are available to me because of my wide-scope degree. However, I recently decided that I want to volunteer for the Peace Corps, and because of that, I declared a minor of Environmental Science. Because of my internship with a political campaign last semester, I have decided that once I return from the Peace Corps, I would like to manage a campaign before jumping into a career. After receiving the higher education required for my desired career path, ideally I would like to work for the State Department. All of these decisions were made because of the growth and identity seeking I was able to complete throughout my years in the IA Scholars program. Through the program, I was introduced to my best friends, who supported my decision making and facilitated my personal growth. IA provides an academic community of likeminded people seeking to learn from each other and from the world in order to become more educated citizens of the world. International Affairs Scholars has been a valuable addition to my growth academically and personally, and has influenced the decisions that I have made that will affect my future in many years.
Month: April 2017
Presenting my Second-Year Project at the Symposium
Towards the end of my Spring 2017 semester at OSU, my International Affairs Scholars program offered me the opportunity to present this poster at a symposium that included all other second year IA Scholars, and first years as well as faculty and scholars coordinators were invited. I was able to talk to many people about an internship that I loved so much, and inspire some first years who were unable to think of a project that they would enjoy doing. I was also able to talk to some faculty that were researching campaign and voter trends, and were very interested in my experience as a volunteer. The symposium gave me a way to make a tangible representation of my time as a campaign intern, and talking about it all night made me realize how much I did enjoy the experience. While at the symposium, my campaign manager texted me and offered me a position for over the summer, which I rapidly snatched up. The campaign and the symposium helped me to create relationships that will be useful for networking in the future.
Competitive Cryptanalysis
Earlier this semester, I participated in an event called Competitive Cryptanalysis through one of my classes, Code and Codebreaking. During the event, there were several teams competing to find the objects designated in the messages. We needed to cryptanalyze the given messages and determine the location of the objects, then retrieve them without getting shot by the other teams (with nerf guns). The main purpose of this event was to put to use the different techniques we (the students) learned in the Code and Codebreaking class in order to break the encryption on a message in a specified amount of time. This gave us the “real-world” stress of time constrained cipher breaking (but with nerf gun weapons and zipties as the objects), as we had only done untimed homework assignments in the past. Overall, the experience was a good bonding exercise with my team, and a great way to practice a series of skills that we had learned over the course of the semester.