Last Thursday, I attended the Latino Heritage Month celebration on the second floor of the Newman Vertical Campus at Baruch. I found it really nice to know that Baruch celebrates Latino Heritage Month because I was able to meet two new people of Hispanic origin at the DJ’s little dance floor and became friends with them. At first I was confused on what the ruckus was because I just came back with my friend Lilia from lunch. We were thrown off by a pleasant surprise with songs that throwback to this summer such as Justin Bieber’s, “Despacito.” The second floor was rather crowded at that time and had a long line for a photo shoot which I unfortunately did not have the chance to do. There were many students of Hispanic or Latino origins socializing and rocking their bodies to the beat of the song. I also noticed that there were many other students that are non-Hispanic or Latino celebrating with us. As someone who’s Asian, I felt a little out of place but the joyful mood and festivity eventually settled in.As much as I thought it was cool for the school to celebrate Latino Heritage month, I do wish that it lasted longer. It would be awesome if there were food and little posters that has fun facts on the history of Latino Heritage month. I stress this because there are some questions I had in mind that were unanswered until I was home to Google the information. I’ve never really been a huge participant of school events events before so this was certainly awkward and strange for me initially. I am thankful to have met new people at this social gathering and I do look forward to other celebration of heritage months in the future such as Asian-Pacific since I am Chinese.
Attached below: Lilia and I asked a fellow classmate of our’s to take a picture of us celebrating in high spirits.
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.
I chose the Hillel Club as my first of three enrichment work shops. I picked this club for a number of reasons. First off In high school I joined many cultural clubs to learn about other cultures. My mom has been employed by a Jewish non profit organization for almost the past twenty years. Through her and countless visits to her office and building strong relationships with her colleagues I have been exposed to much of the Jewish Culture. Since this I have almost an inexplicable interest in the Jewish culture. One reason I believe that I enjoy there culture is because although I’m not Muslim my late grandmother was, and their practices are very similar.
Unicef stands for United Nations Children’s Fund. It is a global organization where they fund to improve the lives of children in help. They protect the rights of children and do anything they can to make their lives better. They try to help every child who is in need of help or under the circumstances of poverty or any type of violence. They know that every child has potentials to do anything so they try their best to support them rather it’s by providing them money or giving them opportunities.