Author Archives: yue.liu2

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Community Service- Walking for Lupus

 

On Oct. 22, I got the
chance to know Lupus by joining a walking hold by The Alliance for Lupus
Research (ALR), which is a national voluntary health organization based in New
York City that was founded in 1999, for the first time. The reason I did this
community service was that it was a requirement of my freshman seminar class.

When I first heard that
I would be engaging in a community service project, I felt that was too much
trouble, since I had to waste my time and energy for others in order to
complete this meaningless project.

The goals of this
walking for Lupus were to cause more people’s attentions to the disease Lupus
and encourage them to contribute either money or time to support the studies
and patients. When I got there, I was shocked, since there were hundreds of
people, including elders and children, standing there and preparing themselves
for the walking. The point was most people showed up that day didn’t suffer
from Lupus, instead, they were there just because they wanted to try their best
to help. This made me realize how selfish I was when I tended to refuse to give
my time and energy to do this community service.

During the whole
process of walking, I was talking with some people who had been involved in
this walking for several years. All of them thought that it was a pleasure to
contribute what they had to help others, and they were all glad to keep
participating this walking every year. Their generousness encouraged me to care
more about others and help them as well.

After I finished this
community service project, I changed my thinking, attitudes and actions towards
others, myself, the community and community service work as a whole. I started
to think that all of us came together and formed our community, and everyone in
our community was important. Therefore for the development and improvement of
our community, we definitely needed community service to help those groups of
people who were in trouble, and we should participate more community services
instead of being selfish and caring only ourselves as well.dmdmffHow has your community service
experience impacted your personallyndsaa

In a word, this service-learning
experience was useful and helpful. I was satisfied with my experience overall,
since I had learnt a lot of things and found a way to improve myself personally.
Therefore I think I will be staying involved in the community during my college
and adult years.

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The Third Workshop-Job Search Strategies

On Dec.1st,
I attended a workshop called “Job Search Strategies” hold by the Starr Career
Development Center during club hour. This workshop talked about some useful
strategies for college students to search for jobs. As a freshman, I am
definitely a beginner of this, so it is really helpful for me to attend this
workshop, even though I may not get a chance to use those strategies I learnt
from that workshop until two or more years later.

At the beginning, the
instructor showed us some common mistakes we made and gave us some suggestions
for them. One of them was that we were kind of unrealistic and her suggestion
was that we should be realistic by knowing clearly what kinds of jobs we were
looking for and interested in.

The other one was that
we were limited by ourselves. We thought that if our majors were accounting, we
could only be accountants in the future. However the instructor showed us an
example, that a company hired a philosophy major student to be its manager, because
it wanted his skills of interpreting and analysis.  Therefore her suggestion was that we should
think more diversity by working something that was not just related to our
majors, and at the same time, working in other states instead of staying here
in New York City if possible.

At last, the instructor
also talked about the informational interviewing which was just asking someone
about what they did. She told us that the knowledge gained from an
informational interview could help us determine which courses and
qualifications were necessary for specific career paths, the types of job or
companies best suited for us. The most important thing she said was that
informational interviewing could aid our job search, therefore it was really necessary
for us to get to know more about informational interviewing.

Overall I think this
workshop “Job Search Strategies” is very useful for me to search for a job
after graduating from college. Therefore I am really happy that I got the
chance to attend this workshop, and I hope I can hear more workshops hold by Starr
Career Development Center in the future.

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New Life at Baruch College

Time flies. When I
started to write this blog, I realized that it was already the end of my first
semester at Baruch College.  During the
past three months, there were a lot of things and new people bursting into my
life that either made me feel depressed, crazy, or made me feel impressed,
happy.

Before I attended
Baruch College, I expected that I would manage and divide my time perfectly
into three aspects: develop my social network, handle my school work and take
care of my personal life. However, since I didn’t develop an effective time
management skill, my whole plan messed up. During a limited period of time, I
could never get all the work of these three aspects done. For example, on
Saturday, I could only stay home, focus on my papers with a cup of coffee and a
McDonald’s No. 5 meal, without handing out with my friends or preparing a big
meal for myself. Similar things kept happening to me showed how my experience
had not lived up to my expectation.

On the other hand, I
really improved my reading skills, which was the experience that had lived
exceeded my expectation. I got a really poor reading skill before I attended
Baruch College. I had to spend a longer period of time either reading or interpreting
an article than others. However, after attending Baruch College, I realized
that the reading assignments I had to complete within one week were almost
equal to the quantity I had to complete within two months when I was in high
school. This situation forced me to really pay attention to my poor reading
skill, and develop it as soon as possible.

Overall, I think my
first semester at Baruch College deserves a B+. Even though there were many
things that had not lived up to my expectations, I still got some achievements
of certain areas under this new environment at college. If I could do my first
semester all again, I would definitely drop my philosophy class at the
beginning instead of being tortured by it for the whole semester, so that I
could use that huge amount of time to study something that was really
attractive for me, because philosophy was really a class that caused people
lots of time but only gave them few rewards.

I don’t think that I
have changed a lot since I started at Baruch College. As I know, I tended to
contribute more time on my school work and my social network; I started to
spend less time at home, and discuss fewer things with my parents. In a word, I
got more involved in college and became more independent at home. I’m not sure
if those changes are right, but I’m sure that they are the marks of my new life
at Baruch College.

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How do I see myself?

 

My life quote is “victory won’t come to me unless I go to it” said by Moore.

This quote encourages me to try my best to achieve my goals no matter under what kinds of hardship. Never stop my steps towards victory and just dream about it, because victory is the goal I set up before; only if I lower it, otherwise it cannot move, therefore the only way to get victory is I go there by myself.

I still remember when I was in elementary school in China, I did really poor at classes, especially at English class. One day, I failed the vocabulary test again, my teacher seemed like could not tolerate me anymore, and decided to call my family. Then after the class, she brought me to her office, informed me that she would make a call tonight and asked me for my home phone number. That was the first time I felt so scared for school stuff. I didn’t want my teacher to tell this to my family, maybe because I really cared about my image in my family’s hearts or something like that. Therefore I started to beg my teacher and promised her that I would definitely get 100 on the next vocabulary test by saying if I failed to do that, she could call my family at that time. My teacher really moved by me and gave me a second chance, and the result turned out that I didn’t let her down. From that time, my life changed.

I started to make higher and higher standards for my school work and wanted to achieve greater and greater victory. Three years ago, I came to New York as a sophomore in High School. I was still motivated and energetic until I realized that my efforts didn’t work so well, and then I became kind of lazy sometimes. For example, I may spend the whole day lying on my bed and watching movies without opening my text book or sleep over 12 hours just because I don’t want to get up. These things which could never happen before are happening now.

Two months ago, I attended Baruch College and became a college student. I figured out that kind of lazy always got me into trouble and made me stay up until 3 or 4am if there were some assignments would due on the next day. At that moment, my life quote jumped out of my mind again, and reminded me what I was supposed to do.

As my life quote says “victory won’t come to me unless I go to it”, I should never stop moving along the way to my victory. Just like the picture shows, if I want to win the competition, I have to run. Although I can rest a few seconds when I feel tired, I can never just stop there because resting is only for me to get ready for running again.

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Who Do You Think You Are?

In my opinion the question “Who Do You Think You Are?” is really meaningless, because the person who is sitting here and writing this blog is just me. Whatever I think shows how I interpret different things, whatever I do shows how I solve problems, and whatever I perform decides how people look at me.

I think I am just the person I am.

Now, as a college student, there are three top concerns about my freshman year at Baruch College.

Firstly, I have to develop self-study skill. When I was in high school, teachers usually taught us everything we supposed to know and summarized it for us, which made me spend just a little time to study at home. However at college, it’s on the opposite side. For every class, teacher assigns homework for us to read the next chapter on the text book. And then, on the next day, he just goes over the main idea with us and leaves everything else for us to figure out by ourselves instead of covering all of them. It forces me to spend a lot of time at home learning it by myself, which I would never have to do in high school. Therefore a self-study skill is very necessary at college, and I have to develop it as soon as possible.

Secondly, I have to develop my own social network. As a business student, although I need to study hard on my courses, it doesn’t mean I have to be a nerd. I should participate in many clubs and act energetically to make a lot of friends using my free time. Because when I graduate from college, get into the society and start my business, I need friends to help me in many different ways. For work, we can either share some information or corporate to do a project; for private, we can either hang out to relax ourselves or solve some personal problems if we need. Therefore I need to figure out the way of making friends and develop my own network.

Thirdly, I have to develop my time management skills. I am the kind of person who really knows how to waste time. I can spend whole day watching movies, chatting with my friends, or just lying on my bed without thinking anything. Then at the end of that day when I am ready to sleep, I feel so sorry about losing another day and hope I can get tomorrow fully used. But guess what? The same thing happens again on the next day. Therefore I always feel so stress out when there comes the deadline of some homework or project that is really important for the class. I have to change this situation right now, because if I keep doing this, I will definitely fail all my classes and harm my future plans.

I, a freshman at Baruch college, with three top concerns in mind, hope to change myself into a better way for my future.

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