This semester I auditioned and was accepted into an a cappella group on campus called Majors & minors (logo below).  I love to sing, and as a STEM major chances for musical expression in my day are few and far between, so this group has been amazing for me.  A cappella means singing without any instruments, so the group members act as the “instruments” when we sing by singing the background chords on different vowels and words.  I’ve been in choirs my whole life, but this is my first experience with a cappella and it is so fun trying something new!  Another difference between a cappella groups and traditional choirs is that a cappella groups tend to sing much more popular, well known music.  Taking songs from the radio and changing them to be performed entirely by a group of singers is super interesting, and in my opinion the outcome is very cool.  We compete in a competition called ICCA (which stands for International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella), which has gained a little recognition recently because it’s featured in the movie Pitch Perfect.  We submitted an audition tape back in October, and we found out recently that we have been selected to move on to the quarter final round, which is very exciting.  We are going to keep working hard on our preparations in the hopes of making it as far into the competition as we can.

The image below is the logo for the team I am on in something called Mount Legacy Week.  I am in the Mount Leadership Society Scholars group at Ohio State, and a major part of our first year experience is participating in Legacy Week.  Legacy Week is a period of time in late January and early February when Mount Scholars do service projects to try and impact our community.  We split into six teams to design service projects in six different categories: Abuse, Education, Environment, Global, Health, and Poverty.  Mount Scholars design, budget, market, and implement the entire projects ourselves— obviously we receive lots of help, but the idea is that we are the catalyst in every step of the service project.  It makes it so much more impactful when we complete every aspect of hosting a service project ourselves, rather than just showing up and volunteering at an event hosted by someone else.  This way, we really get the time to understand the reasoning behind any given project, and do everything we can to best serve the needs of the agencies we work with.

I am a member of Team Abuse.  Our motto is “fighting harm, giving hope”.  This is a message that really speaks to me because Team Abuse is all about treating every person with the dignity and respect they deserve.  There is obviously not much we can do in the way of preventing abuse, unfortunately, as we don’t really have the necessary qualifications to work with emergency organizations.  We can, however, work with survivors of all sorts of terrible abuse, and our goal is to make them feel “normal”, and that they are appreciated and have worth.  I am proud to be a member of Team Abuse and proud of the projects we’ve developed for Mount Legacy Week.

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