Blog post#1

Beta Alpha PSI General Interest Meeting

Posted on by m.yuan

Before I got to Baruch, my two older brothers encouraged me to join clubs and get used to the campus I would be attending for the next four years. What I didn’t realize was the amount of clubs/organizations Baruch had to offer. With my two hour and 30 minute break between classes every Tuesday and Thursday, I felt the need to venture out and find a club/organization that interested me.

As I was going down the escalator and heading home, I was approached by Darius, one of the leaders of the fraternity Beta Alpha PSI. When I heard the word fraternity, my thoughts immediately thought about the horrific article I read about the tragic death of a Baruch freshman at a fraternity and about the hazing process I would have to go through to be accepted. Darius quickly turned down my ideology and explained how Beta Alpha PSI was a business fraternity that helped members with their interview skills, reviewed resumes, and build connections that would be useful for post-college life.

I decided to go to the Second General Meeting that was held today. I was amazed by the crowd for this meeting as they ran out of seats (and pizza) in the room. I learned how Beta Alpha PSI has been around since 1951 and that there were 300 chapters and 300,000 members worldwide. These numbers made me believe that this frat was pretty legit. The members of this fraternity explained how they found Beta Alpha PSI and it helped them with finding jobs at pretty legit firms (JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs to name a few). The three values the members held dearly were Professionalism, Brotherhood, and Service. I was impressed to know that all the members had each others back and didn’t forget where they came from by doing community service. I was somewhat eager to join, but I was turned off by the fact that I needed a 90+ GPA from high school (since I was a freshman and I was about to achieve an 89) and also I felt that I couldn’t make time for this fraternity because the Baruch Swim Season is about to start and I won’t have time to balance both the fraternity and the life of a student athlete.

Joining ToastMasters!

Posted on by r.wadolowski

Rafal Wadolowski

Today a couple a of friends and I joined ToastMasters. In this club people come in to practice their public speaking not only to get over their fear of public speaking but to also excel in the art of speaking off the cuff. I wanted to join this club for a variety of reasons, the first one being that archery club is on Saturdays, so thats a no from me. But in addition to that, I want to get used to standing and talking to a large crowd of people before I have to do it for an important presentation or social setting.

Some of my old experiences that could have been improved had I been attending this club for a while was when I was a finalist in my high school story telling competition. I was telling a story to a group of 50-60 students, from memory. I remember being really excited , which may have led me to speed through parts of my story, also my legs were pretty wobbly just because of the amount of eyes staring at me.

What I am looking forward to is being around dozen of other students that have the same goal in mind as me, also not only will mr wobbly legs eventually go away after time, but the other club members will offer me constructive criticism and advice on how I could keep the audience engaged all while appearing cool and collected.

And lastly, I got to talk with the president of toastmasters, who’s name is mike, and just like me he is Polish. His family and my family both immigrated to America, which is pretty neat.

And lastly(real this time), I also wanted to join other clubs such as Polish Culture club and adrenalin club, depending on which days the clubs meet up.

(Every time I tried to upload the picture it said error, but its the same photo as the one on Daniel.Maslowski’s blog.)