Brittany – First-Year Seminar 2017

Career

The Starr Career Development Center offers a wide array of options to point you toward the career that is best for you, including the extensive Focus-2 Assessment, which gauges your interests, personality, values, and leisure habits to determine what careers fit your current lifestyle. The results show you just about every career under the sun, with the average annual salary and majors at Baruch that remotely correspond with the aforementioned career.

After I took the first portion of the test, I was told that I am a more artistic thinker (something that I was already very aware of, and I was shown jobs that matched)

You are then given the option to click on a career that interests you, and see what is required of a person in that field, such as degree, and even temperament.

While I was given scientific options, I prefer the more artistic side of life, and this assessment actually showed me options in the arts that I didn’t even know existed, such as “Art Director”. Which is any person who the designs the atmosphere for a piece of visual art, including television and movies.

I was quite pleased to see that one of the careers that I matched for was screenwriter, since that is one of the things that I want to do, along with director, actor, author and other things, but this assessment opened my eyes to possibilities I didn’t even know were there.

Modern “Art”

I’ve never really been super into art to be honest, but I thought why not go

to a museum? I mean, I love the arts, but not specifically art. Or so I thought.

We all tend to have our own preconceived notions as to what art is or what it may be, and that goes for anything, but when I walked into The Museum of Modern Art, I was right.

But I was also wrong.

I mean, of course they had the usual paintings and whatnot. The famous “Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh (and I took pictures of it), but then there were the spiders.

There were literal giant sculptures of spiders, one in the center of the room, and one suspended on the wall. Right next to a life size helicopter, and adjacent to a scale model of the building itself.

They have theaters and stores, photography and design. And an entire floor dedicated to fashion, the most commonly seen form of art.

And honestly the most beautiful thing in the entire museum to me, was actually sitting outside of it. A 50 ft tall sculpture of a rose, that I could not take my eyes off of. It just captivated me.

Just yesterday in my History 1003 class, my professor was telling us about how people view art. Asking us whether or not certain things qualify as art, and for some things (like a can with the ‘artist’s’ poop in it) I was quick to say no. But after coming here, and seeing this…I don’t really know what art is. It all depends on you and how you see it. I guess that’s why people like art, and I guess I never really understood that.

Welcome to ‘Chit Chat’

Baruch College welcomes new students! As nice as that may be, it’s never really that simple to acclimate yourself into a new community, well it never has been for me. And despite being in an environment that feels much more responsible and mature than that of high school. The cliques remain.

Welcome to Chit Chat! A group whose main goal is to ‘dispel the exclusive nature of Baruch Hallways’. And honestly I didn’t know what it meant what I first heard it but I’ll do my best to explain.

As I said before, even though Baruch is a much more mature environment than a high school, there are still cliques, and certain clubs seek out only people of certain qualities, may they be certain personalities, career goals, ethnicities, or even levels of talent (groups or clubs that you have to audition for). Not to say that this is bad in every case. (You wouldn’t want someone who can’t act joining the school musical.)

No, it’s more that, sometimes there are people that don’t fit any of these categories, and they end up being left out of everything.

Chit Chat seeks to rectify that! They create a Haven where literally anyone can come and belong, where anyone can come and have their voice heard completely without judgement and/or ridicule.

This year the theme is productive fun, you can have fun while improving yourself and furthering your career goals. They have events such as speed meet, LinkedIn photo shoot, underrepresented major panel and much more.

As far as I could gather from the first meeting there are no unrealistic obligations, or any at all to be honest, Chit Chat is a totally chill and relaxed space where you can be yourself and nothing other than yourself. They want their members to understand that being who you are, is the only way you can be truly successful.