Workshop Blog: Academic Enrichment

The panel at the Academic Enrichment workshop consisted four very diversely experienced individuals. These individuals were Charles N. Li the author of The Bitter Sea, Katrin Hansing a faculty member of Baruch College and a Associate Professor of Black and Hispanic Studies, Tashi Chodron a spokeswomen for the Tibetan Resettlement Project and finally Bruce Payne a director and teacher of programs in leadership and the arts at Duke University, respectively in the order of appearance. The panel discussion was conducted by having each panel from left to right introduce themselves and their stories, then the question and answer portion proceeded. The questions that were dealt with in this discussion were all related to the idea of identity and diversity, for example, all four panel members were of some short mixed origin including the moderator Stan Altman, a Greek Jew. The questions were interesting because they made me think about the friends that I had who were also of mixed decent and what they have to go through in their future and maybe what my kids may have to go through in a future where their identity is not clear. The workshop was what I expected because as I read the paper given out during Freshman Seminar, “What is an Enrichment Workshop?”, the description for the Academic Enrichment workshop fit what I saw during the discussion, the discussion of identity and this was what I expected as we in our freshman seminar class did the same, wrote about our identity.