DTE: Surviving College 101

It is a great pleasure for me to go to Rubin Museum of Art. This museum have the largest Western collection of religious art from cultures of the Himalayan mountain range, the birthplace of Buddhism. As a Buddhist, I felt so excited about it and enjoyed this meaningful experience. Among all there are some pieces left me deep impressions. The piece “Samvara in union with Vajrayogini” is a gilt copper statue that from Tibet, circle 1400. In the piece “Samvara in union with Vajrayogini”, there is a Buddha embraced by two divine couple dragon and looks like wearing scarves on. The whole piece is bronze and gilt copper. It looks shining in the window under the light. It also has many pearls on the Buddha. The jewelry and pearls are big and heavy perhaps to represent wealth and happiness. In the piece, Samvara is the meditational god of the Kagyu schools and Tibet people. The great art and shape of the Buddha reflected the art attainment and talent of the artist of this statue.

In my opinion, this piece of Buddha statue is developing a feeling of wealth and happiness because of the heavy and big jewelry which were wearing on the Buddha. The Buddha also embraced by dragon which means the people of the Tibet would also be blessed by the Buddha. The statue also is bronze and gilt copper. The shinning color tone also shows that this Buddha is representing a good life. In this piece, the posture of the Buddha is bending his knee in one side and smiling looking at the dragon. It also shows the power and wealth that the Buddha has. Because of this Buddha is representing wealth and happiness. In my opinion, the function of this Buddha is for the Tibet people to pray for good life. The people of Tibet built this piece of art and people could come to pray every time if any people feeling bad of their life. This Buddha also represents power because of the dragon on its body. Therefore, People may go to pray for power in real life also and have a good life.

The piece “Diverse forms of Mahakala and other protectors” during central Tibet, Gelugpa school 1805 to 1820, there is many deities trying to protecting some deities. In this painting, numerous deities established a scene of grandness and shake. The fire on the deities’ body is shining and looks like moving to somewhere. The painting used a dark color tone to illustrate the power and threating of those deities. The deities in this painting all have the same skin color and fire. This seemed to unite and protect for the same purpose. The content of this painting said, “The painting is dedicated to nine wrathful deities held prominently in the Gelugpa School.” Therefore, it told us its nine powerful protectors in this painting. Every protector in this painting seem has its own power and story could be told by other art sculptures.

So, I went to the Small Talk 2 workshop.  For the most part it had to do with small talk that we as future employees would engage in with our coworkers, managers, bosses or possibly, CEO’s.  This workshop was beneficial in the fact that it emphasized the idea that small talk is in essence, small, and as a result is not meant to be a full blown conversation.  It is simply meant to possibly exchange a few thoughts, show your personality and get your name out there.  The fact that you have the courage to engage in small talk shows that you are outgoing and not afraid.  Small talk is something that I typically undertake in on a day to day basis, so I feel that this workshop gave me valuable pointers on how to really use it in a business environnment.  Overall, the workshop was valuable.

The third workshop that I went is called Email Excellence. It was a lecture about writing proper emails. It was a very interesting and impressive workshop indeed. First of all I think the speaker is really professional and articulate. He prepared some useful notes for us and during his talk, he made me understand why people should care about writing proper emails, although most of them do not. Communication does not just limit to face-to-face nowadays, there are so many more technologies that facilities business and daily conversations, email is one of  the most important ones. When a person send an email to someone, the receiver usually judges the writer based on his/her contents in the email if they never seen each other. This makes sending proper email critical because when we seek for job opportunities we usually do it via email. If the procedure is not done correctly we might end up losing the chance. The speaker not only taught us how we should write specifically in an email, but also how to name a proper subject for the email. Email is a serious business and it mat entail serious risk. I gained pretty much knowledge from this meaningful workshop and I hope that other students can attend this workshop if there’s a chance.

Perfection in a resume isn’t just for perfectionists, but rather anyone who cares about landing a job.  Employers only pay 30 seconds to each resume, if that, so you need to be able to grab their interest upon first glance and lure them in to read more.  They advised us to utilize “power verbs” to describe your responsibilities at past jobs.  They took all our questions and advised us how to tweak your resume based on different employment opportunities to show your employer that you are a proper fit.  I certainly underestimated the amount of time, energy, and attention needed to make your resume stand out from the others.  I feel as if I can produce my resume effectively, but I can use resume review offered by STARR to help identify any mistakes made.

For my workshop 3 I went to the art social in the 22nd building. It was fun the photos were from taken by a photographer named Hilton. All the pictures were black and white and they were taken with film cameras, i dont remember the exact date but i am sure they were taken before 1990. One of the pictures was called door of color. O n the door someone had painted only whites allowed and there was a african american standing outside. I liked the pictures at it conveyed a contrasting story about racial discrimination. Overall the exhibition was a very well organized and an entertaining experiance

I attended a workshop titled “Between Two Worlds”, and i realized that we are really lucky to be in the United States. This workshop showed a documentary about the struggles in Israel. This film showed that there are people in the world who stand up and would die for what they believed in. People were upset when certain facts that they believed to be false were shown in the film. The saddest part of the film was when it showed how the tanks ran over a girl named Rachel who was protesting peace in Israel. I believe that everyone should know the positives and the negatives about the country. Once the negatives are identified, we should work towards solving those problems.

I went to the workshop “Build Confidence! Improving Your Interpersonal Skills.” I was a little late on that day and when I came to the class I saw Mindy and Lalit sitting in the class. There were many other people sitting around and they definitely were nor freshmen. The first impression I had was that this class may be helpful since many others came here not for the reason of freshmen seminar. The professor was an Asian and she looked like she knew what she’s doing and what she should teach us. The class was not boring as I thought I would be. Instead, I found it interesting even though it was a little awkward at first. We first stood up and made a circle, then introduce ourselves in a weird way. We had to put our hands together like when praying and pointing it at someone else to introduce ourselves. She said that by doing this she can tell immediately who is not confident because someone avoided eye contact or couldn’t do the movement fluently. The lessons she tried to teach us are that eye contact is a very important way to show confidence but in some culture people avoid eye contact to show respect. After seeing some power points she had, we stood up again and did another activity. We paired up and tried to copy our partners’ movements while. She taught us that it’s human nature that people copy other’s gesture unintentionally. She also pointed out that it’s actually helpful when you doing that because it makes the person who you are talking with feel comfortable. The workshop ended very fast, and I had to run to my next class. However, I found the workshop helpful for the reasons that the professor taught us how to communicate and advices for interview.

Had it not been for this class I probably wouldn’t have gone to a single workshop. I went to the resume workshop which was actually helpful. The workshop stressed the importance of resumes and supplied a bunch of samples of what to write and what not to write. On the down side they kept on stressing about how so many people can make simple mistakes. I know resumes aren’t easy, but the instructors made them look like that they are almost impossible to make. In my opinion if you know the format and stick to it, then there is nothing to worry about. Yet going to the workshop makes me think that there is something to worry about………. Well at the very least, since I attended the resume workshop, I can now get any resumes I write to be reviewed and corrected.

I went to a workshop the other day…..it sucked.  It was about making small talk and the importance behind it.  This was a workshop I registered a month ago because I had some interest in it.  It was awkward, useless, and a waste of my club hours.  Basically, I don’t think the host said one word about a business meeting.  He kept talking about conversing in a social manner. O yeah that reminds me, THERE’S NO WORD CALLED “CONVERSATING”….it’s “CONVERSING”. ANYWHOOO, yeah so he kept talking about conversing in a social environment.  He unknowingly made it seem like we were all losers.  I know he wouldn’t do that, but that’s what it seemed like.  But it wasn’t just me, everyone thought the same thing because he told us to go around the room and form groups of three and meet each other.  He gave us topics to talk about, I deviated from that and decided to talk about how strange I thought he was and how this was nothing like I expected.  EVERYONE agreed with me.  He gave us a packet with like fifty things to say when you run out of things to say….I could have picked better conversation starters out of my ass.  Regardless, I spent the rest of workshop thinking about how I could DEFINITELY teach this workshop better and what else I would teach….well if it were really about talking in a social environment because there was no doubt in my mind, that I could pick up more women in a bar than this guy could.  I was hoping he would give some tips on avoiding awkward silences.  It doesn’t really happen that much to me because I have my own techniques and I clearly love to talk and ramble as you can probably tell….but still, I would love to hear from someone else.  If I taught a workshop, I would also teach how to CREATE an awkward silence.  Sometimes, creating an awkward silence is a good way to just break out into mental laughter which I BELIEVE, is the cure to most of the planet’s diseases.  That, and it helps send the message to others that you don’t want to talk with them.  I was pretty upset after the workshop because I feel like these resources that Baruch offers can be helpful, but after my one bad workshop, I lost faith in workshops and I lack the motivation to register for another one.  I am confident, that I can become a better motivational speaker.

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.