Section LC12

I really enjoyed this workshop. It is a good workshop to go to for those that are having a hard time transitioning from high school to college. It talked about ways to handle the work load and to manage your stress. There was an interesting activity involving a raisin. You had to feel its texture get to know it then eat it. This activity got your mind off other things and i found it helpful. This workshop took me out of my comfort zone. I became aware of my problems with stress and how i should manage them. The raisin activity was out of the ordinary. I would recommend this workshop for any incoming freshman since it was very helpful for me.

This workshop was designed to help students cope with the new-found stress that comes with the first semester of college. Though I haven’t found the transition from high school to college to be particularly difficult, this workshop did provide some interesting methods of dealing with stress when it does arise. It concentrated on managing stress levels through logical and sometimes even quirky (the raisin thing) ways as well as avoiding unnecessary issues with people in our lives such as our parents and our friends. I can definitely see why Baruch would attempt to incorporate this type of curriculum into freshman workshops. I recommend it to anyone who has serious stress issues or would simply like to learn about dealing with issues in college.

This was the second art workshop I attended, but decided to use an art workshop to substitute for a personal enrichment workshop since the first one I attended was very captivating. I didn’t expect the Baruch Sidney Mischkin gallery to update it’s works so often, but instead of the farmland photographs that I expected to see, there were paintings from an impessionist artist by the name of Mercedes Matter. She was strongly influenced by the impressionist movement, since her paintings did not depict anything that looks at all like the subject matter — for example, her still-lifes of fruits on a  table look more like a bomb explosion than apples and pears. The gallery was divided into three separate periods — her early works on the far left, her mature works in the center, and her late works on the far right. I personally enjoyed some of her earliest works the most, since I’m not a big fan of abstract art, and like art to actually look like something recognizable as opposed to a mishmosh of colors. My favorite painting of hers is one that she painted of a flower, at age 15.

Overall, this was a educational workshop, and if there’s a freshman that doesn’t have anything to do for 15 minutes, I’d strongly reccomend going to visit.

Since there were no more Personal Enrichment worlshops left, I went to another Art exhibit at Sidney Mishkin on Tuesday, December 1st.  It was overall a pretty decent exhibit on the painter, Mercedes Matter. They showed her work from her early ages as a child all the way to her older years. It was cool to see how the artist changed and not change in artistic style through her life. Many of her pieces were impressionism/modernism, and all had an abstract feeling to them. None of them exactly protrayed life objects, but rather gave an ‘impression’ of it. Many of Matter’s paintings were still lifes and it was great to see still lifes in an abstract perspective. Overall, I thought the gallery was nice, and even a little bit better than the Nature of Landscape one in the beginning of the semester.

I attended this workshop, and found out some new interesting facts about Baruch and its services. First of all, I did not know that they could assist us in such a way that could help us relieve our stress and learning new ways to make ourselves feel better physically and emotionally. The workshop itself was more of a little boring, but the contents were pretty interesting and several activities, which I found a little funny; such as relieving stress by holding a raisin in our hands; were indeed a bit helpful and it made me feel comfortable on a way. This workshop also taught us how to deal with parental problems, which I found very useful. Overall, it was not a bad workshop, there are some things that can be improved but I think it was worth it. Would I recommend it? Yes, it might not be the most amazing workshop to go to, but it sure does help through some tough stressful situations during the first semester in college.

This workshop turned out to be a little of a disappointment for me.  I know that the goal of this workshop was to help you get relaxed and relieve stress but the only thing it did for me was put me to sleep.  The two instructors for the workshop were actual therapist that worked at the Baruch clinic where people or studnets could go if they were having problems with family or anything in general.  I never knew a place like that existed in Baruch so if I was able to take anything away form this workshop that would be it.  Besides that though theres not much else.  We did a bunch of excercises that were supposed to help us get loose and relazxed such as feeling a raisin in our hands and then rolling it aorund in our mouths, moving our shoulders back and forth, and just closing our eyes and taking deep breaths.  Following these excercises was practicing talking to parents about certain things you want to talk to them about.  This was actually kind of helpful becasue almost everyone would love to have an open relationship with their parents but it is almost impossible.  The instruectorsgave us a scenario in which they suggested several strategies to approach your parents.  Overall though I wouldn’t say this is a great workshop but not terrible.