DTE: Surviving College 101

My experience donating blood was like another one ever before, 
I was a bit skeptical about donating but I felt as I 
need to do this. Knowing that someone out there needs 
a blood transfusion. I donated at the GEORGE WASHINGTON 
hotel and the process was a smooth 30 minutes I was in and out. 
They pricked my finger to check for HIV, and to check 
my blood pressure. 
Soon after I got comfortable and began the process 
of donating blood. Knowing that me 
and a few others took the initiative to donating and helping save someones life 
was amazing. When a bag and 4 small tubes of blood were full 
they collected the blood and felt great.

In high school, my friends and I had joined the Bronx Science Key Club, which is a community service club. We admired people who would go to undeveloped places and help the people there. So we did what we could and we donated blood. Also as Dan had said, free food, yay /o/. However this was back in my high school days. However after becoming high school seniors, my friends and I didn’t go to the club as much, and we ended up just hanging out together after school.

Also near where I live there is a Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club. It is a club for children and teenagers alike. They have a court outside for baseball and other games, skating rink, sprinklers, indoor basketball court, pool tables, ping pong tables, etc. I went there a few times during middle school for a school trip, and had lots of fun, so i decided to volunteer there for the community service requirement. I walked around and helped look for equipment and helped the young kids. Parents would often bring them there after school or they would come themselves. Then around after 5 pm or so, the parents would come and pick them up. Sometimes I would always feel grateful for having my mom waiting at home for me.

A bad thing that happened was, since I lived in the Bronx, I was actually the only Asian there. People would sometimes just give me weird looks as if I was weird being there. Though I also met some new people, they were just as bad at ping pong as me /o/. I usually tell them that I was one of the few fail Asians that can’t play ping pong or draw :(. They would also often laugh at me. This community service was one of the more enjoyable life experiences. However now I would much rather find a job first.

I went to the “Email Excellence” workshop a month or so ago, and as procrastination has it, I’ve only now gotten the willpower to write about it.

As one could infer from the name of the workshop, it’s about how to write effective email. I thought the entire workshop was extremely helpful from start to finish. The speaker was I think the head of a company that specializes in email communication (or something along those lines), and, as expected, was extremely knowledgeable in the topic. He knew how to engage the audience and made the whole workshop interesting and not boring at all.

The centerpiece of the whole workshop was it being the job of the writer of the email to make the reader’s task of reading the email less of a burden. In other words: It’s the job of the writer to simplify the reader’s job of reading. Like, for example, you don’t want to send someone who can only be reached by e-mail on their smartphone a long, verbose email. That is the last thing they want to do on a phone—to scroll through a wall of text on a phone. One has to be concise when writing emails.

The workshop was extremely helpful, and sure I’ll put what I learned in it to good use once/if I’m required in the future to write a profuse amount of emails.

 I went to the workshop “Build Confidence! Improving Your Interpersonal Skills.” It was one of the earlier ones, on November 1. There were a lot of upperclassmen, and I was kind of surprised. Some of the people there don’t seem like they really needed this workshop, since they looked pretty confident and talked well. At first I had my expectations pretty low, since there was a power point, and I thought how can someone teach confidence while using a power point. But however I was wrong, the power point was used much. We would stand up in the middle and do some exercises.

We started off with everyone standing in the middle of the room, introducing ourselves while doing a weird movement that involves us putting our hands together like when praying and pointing it at someone else saying “Hi, I am blah blah blah.” By watching each others body language, tone and eye connection, we were able to see whether we were nervous or not. One of the exercise was doing a yawn like movement. We would do a short yawn, and then a longer one while trying to project our yawn. The workshop professor said that it would teach us to project our voice better, and we wouldn’t talk in a monotone or too high/low tone when talking to future interviewers. Another is one where we try to match the movements of our partner, however we first had it wrong since we were talking, and didn’t really do what she was asking. Then when we stopped talking and started to match each others movements, it was really awkward.

I felt the workshop was pretty helpful. I felt kind of awkward in the workshop, but it went by pretty nicely. The workshop professor gave us nice tips on how to do well in a interview. The professor was happy and wasn’t afraid to make a fool of herself to show us how things should be done. I felt like these workshops are pretty useful, and will continue to go if needed.

I don’t really have much to say about whether my experience at Baruch lived up to my expectations or not. I didn’t really have any major expectations before coming to Baruch, except for the usual “lots of reading and papers.” I just viewed it almost as a continuation of high school. So I don’t really have much to say in this area. Though I will say that I miss gym class. That’s about the only thing that disappointed me the most about college. I had tons of fun during gym class in high school; now, I can only reminisce about those times.

I think my first semester at Baruch went pretty well. I got decent grades, but just not as good as I would like them to be. But finals week is coming up: one last chance to redeem myself?

I think I will work a little bit harder to get perhaps slightly better grades if I could do this all over again. But whom am I kidding? I know that I’ll still slack off. And maybe I would join a club. It’s near the end of the semester and I still haven’t gotten to doing that yet.

I really honestly don’t think I’ve changed at all. Or maybe now I’m willing to spend more time doing schoolwork, but I think that’s about it. Nothing major happened during the first semester that would’ve changed me.

The college life in Baruch College is just what I have expected before I entered Baruch College, I have lots of assignments and essays to complete, meeting new people and many final exams or essays to prepare in only one week which is shortening my life span right now. For first semester, I think I am doing alright. I am doing decent in most of my classes, I got used to hours of commuting which was really painful about 3 month ago and I also got used to be squeezed by crowd. If I get chance to redo first-semester year, I would study harder to get better grade than what I am receiving now and I also would drop one of my classes because I now regret about not dropping one class. I have not changed at all since I entered Baruch College. Some of my friend has said that when a person enters a college, they become more “adults”, but I feel like I am still in high school and I do not feel all the responsibility that college students should have. I hope remaining years in college would make me more mature.

I went to volunteer in this place less than a block from my home. They work with children—and from the looks of it, with newly arriving children from China to tutor them and teach them English. I don’t really like working with children, but the whole thing went largely uneventfully. At first, I thought it’d be a problem to be asking to volunteer in some Chinese place since, being as I’m rebelling somewhat against my Chinese culture and that I was raised in Puerto Rico, my Chinese is abysmal at best. I only know the very simplest basic understanding of Cantonese. I don’t know a single word in Mandarin—the dialect that most Chinese speak—except for the well-known “ni hao.” But it was fine. They just told me to give juice and cookies to the kids and help around the classroom. I didn’t have to do any of the actual teaching.

The whole thing went pretty uneventfully, but there was this one thing that happened that I thought I should mention. I gave some apple juice to a girl that seemed to be around 5 years old. Once I gave it to her, she asked me, “Will this make me fat?” I stayed there for a few seconds, perplexed and pondering why would a 5-year-old be worried about their weight. I then answered: No. She then asked: Why? I stare at her again for a few seconds trying to figure out what to tell her. I finally respond with what has to be the most vague answer: Because it’s apple juice.

This is one reason why I don’t like working with kids. They ask too many questions. And those questions are generally pretty easily answered, but I was definitely not expecting that question. I would’ve never thought that a 5-year-old would be worrying about her weight. Isn’t that a bit too early?

I did community service in church about a year. Community service was about taking care of disabled people. For first 8 months, I was assigned to take care of James. He was blind and he also suffered from cerebral palsy, a disorder that prevent  a person’s brain from developing. I really did nothing for first 6 month because James always slept, so I also slept in a sofa while other volunteers had to take people to classes and listen to boring lectures. However, I sometimes had to change his diapers. It would not be hard to change child’s diapers, but James was 6 years older than me, so it was quite a work. For remaining 4 months, I had to take care of another person, I forgot his name. I really do not want to say this, but he had terrible personalty . He wouldn’t grab a spoon or fork unless some woman is near him and he wouldn’t listen a single word from me only because i am male, but only listened to me when he needed help in going to restroom and do whatever he needs to do. He was the reason for me to quit doing volunteer jobs. Before doing community service, I always considered myself as good person, but this experience taught me that being a good person is hard to do.

I went to the workshop called “Writing Winning Resumes”. As name tells it, it was about writing good resume . Career adviser and assistant spent about one hour to tell student about basic guideline for resume. They said that people should include honors, awards, job history, foreign language, education and all the basic stuffs that indicate their worthiness. They also said that people should not include GPA unless it is above 3.0, I think it basically means that people with below 3.0 GPA will have a hard time with getting a decent job.

The workshop was overall so-so. In all honesty, I planned to finish assignments for classes, but I could not do it because the room for the workshop was too small. I paid attention at first, but I got extremely tired because of previous classes, so I did not paid attention that much in the end. Adviser asked people to form a group to answer some questions, I really hated that because I just wanted to sit and listen. Many people left before the workshop ended and some of the people left right after they signed on computer. I also wanted to leave, but I did not want to be rude, so I stayed. One thing that I really disliked about the workshop was it’s environment, many instructor or staffs (I think) continuously came in and left to get something, it was really annoying and prevented me from paying attention.

For out third required workshop for freshman otientation, i went with Timmy, Matt, and Vincent to the second small talk workshop held on December 6th. Since most of us wanted to enter the business world, we figured that learning some small talk skills from a professional would be a good experience. However, the problem with this was that the guy running the workshop wasnt a professional in small talk. Im pretty sure that he said he was an intern, which was a bad sign from the start. (That, and his acne, which made me think that he just started doing this as a job, and his low, semi stuttering voice and how he stumbled over the simplest sentences….but enough of that, lets move on.)  Unsurprisingly (not sure thats a word, but whatever), our fears were confirmed when we were only 10 minutes into the workshop. I was expecting a suave, businessman with a tenor voice to be explaining to us how small talk worked . I would have even been satisfied with a powerpoint presentation (And i simply HATE powerpoint presentations, so you know how bad this thing was.) Instead, i got an intern that obviously didnt know what he was doing. He kept looking at notes to remind himself what he was supposed to be saying, and left most of the talking to us. He would ask an example of what small talk was. Once someone raised there hand and gave a good answer, he would just pause, and wait for someone else to raise their hand. After 30 seconds of akward silence, someone else would, and give the exact same answer worded a bit differently. This process would repeat, and after a while i realized that almost 15 minutes had passed with akward stop and go questions, which the intern obviously wasnt familiar with. (Now im not the best public speaker or discussion leader, but this kind of behavior shows me that this guy has never led a workshop before. Seriously, did he even plan out what he wanted to do in this thing? There were sooooooooooooooooo manyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy akward pauses when he checked his notes on what to do next. I think I couldve led the workshop better in all honesty.) The rest of the people there realized this too. When the workshop started, there were about 20 of us students. When we finally got to our first group activity, 3 or 4 of them simply left with their bags, and never came back. I cant say i blame them. Slowly, more and more people trickled out, coming up with excuses like “i feel sick”  (BS!!! you look fine!!!) or ” i have a 1:20 class” (yea right, i dont think there even is a 1:20 class, but good for them to have the courage to stand up and walk out)”. Eventualy, there was only 10 of us left. Me and my friends, a senior mentor and his mentee who were obligated to sit it out, and a few people that seemed to care a bit more than the average person, or were just too polite to leave.  There was one kid who took matters in his own hands and moved the discussion along. (Thank god for him. Otherwise, i think we still would have been stuck on “what is small talk?” by nightfall. Im tell you, that kid is going places in life. I admire his leadership skills.) However bad the intern was at giving this workshop, i believe he sensed that we wanted to go, and let us out about 20 minutes early. Before he ended it, he asked us if “there was anything we would recommend to improve future workshops.”  Looking around the room, i could tell that most of us were thinking “maybe actually give us a real workshop?!?!?!” but were too polite to say it. Once girl spoke up, saying that there should be a follow up workshop about business small talk. (Good initiative girl, if it werent for you, we’d still be sitting there well past the ending time, avoiding eye contact with each other and wishing we were somewhere else.) I can honestly say that that was the worst workshop that i had ever been to. Also, the only thing that i learned was that you should make a public speaker do these workshops in the future, not interns.

Well, i have taken up enough of your precious time ranting about this workshop, so ill end it here. If you have to do a workshop in the future, i wish you the best of luck in finding one led by a good speaker. If you are Shirley or Amy, please give me an A+ in the class. If you someone that works at baruch, and can make decisions in who does what workshop, please NO MORE INTERNS.

I sincerely thank you for your time.