Author: y.mai

For my career workshop, I went to the America Needs You (ANY) fellowship information session. I was informed about this information session by one of friends, who also went to the ANY information session. The session was on November 13, and was suppose to start at 3:30 PM. However, my philosophy class ends at 3:45 PM, so I was going to be at least fifteen minutes late to the meeting. To my surprise, the information session did not even start yet when I arrived around 3:47 PM. In addition, there were only two other students attending the session, one of which was my friend. In other words, there were only a total of three students attending this ANY fellowship information session. When I realized that there were only three students, I had a pretty strong urge to laugh. Well to be honest, if I did not have to do a career workshop blog post, I would not have attended this meeting either. So after I arrived and sat down, the people in charge presented a slideshow to us. Ironically, three of the slideshows were some forms of icebreakers for the students, which were relatively pointless considering that there were only three students in the room. Later into the meeting, two other students entered the room, making a total of five people; which was still a pitiful number of students in a career workshop. Although there was a pitiful number of students attending the workshop, the ANY information session was still useful. The presenters explained that ANY was a program that assisted low income first generation college students in their college career. The program would assist these low income college students by answering their college questions. In addition, the program would provide internship opportunities to students that successfully join the ANY program. This program may be beneficial to me in the future as I am a first generation college student.

On Sunday, October First, I went to the American Museum of Natural        History. I went to the museum because my anthropology homework required me to go to the “Hall of Human Origins” in the American Museum of Natural History. For the assignment, I had to create nine questions based on what I learned in the museum. In other words, my professor wanted the class to create a set of questions that proved we  went to the museum and learned something. After understanding the assignment, I took about a hour long train ride to the museum. Once I arrived at the museum, I was asked to open my bag and a staff member searched it. Afterwards, I waited in line to buy my ticket and also asked where the “Hall of Human Origins” was. Even though I acquired a map of the museum, it took me a couple of minutes to figure out where the “Hall of Human Origins” was. When I finally made it to the “Hall of Human Origins”, I began observing the displays to acquire information for my questions. The first display that I noticed was a display that explained the evolution of humans. It explained that at one point in time, humans began to branch off from primates and created a new species called homo sapiens. The display also explained that many of our primate ancestors died off due to their inability to adapt to the changing environment. After I finished studying this display, I created a question that asked why the diversity of primates decreased over time. For this multiple choice question, four options were provided. Once I finished creating the first question, I moved on to the next display to create my second question. I repeated this process until I accumulated a total of nine questions. Since I was finished with my assignment, I no longer had a reason to stay in the museum. After fumbling with the map to find the exit, I left the museum and went to eat lunch before returning home.

On Thursday, September 7th 2017, I attended a general interest meeting of the United Chinese Language Association(UCLA). The purpose of UCLA is to spread chinese culture in Baruch college. Or it could simply be a club for relaxation and for students to have fun. I attended the general interest meeting mainly because I had nothing better to do in my free time. During the meeting, the staff members of UCLA were introduced and a few icebreaker games were played. The classroom, which was completely filled with students, was first divided into two teams. Then each team chose a representative from their group to compete in the game, I do not remember the game’s name. However, the game’s purpose was for each representative to guess the possible words on the board after being given a topic and a sentence, similar to the game show “Family Feud”. The representative’s acquired their answers from their team members and began guessing the words. Each team could only guess incorrectly three times before they lost their chance to guess. After a couple of rounds, the team with the most amount of points wins. Even though I was not one of the representatives of my team, I still had fun from laughing at both team’s answer choices. Sometimes people would shout out ridiculous answers and I had a good laugh from that. The second game that I remember playing was a game called “Zoom”, where each team had to guess what the zoomed in picture on the board was. Each time a team answered correctly, they would get a point. The team with the most points in the end would win. Surprisingly, the game was relatively easy as people were able to quickly and accurately guess the picture. I do not remember whether my team won or lost that game though. After the games ended, people started lining up for food. When most of the people finished getting their food, I took a picture with Louis, who I believe to be the leader of UCLA.