Author: t.chen11

For the third blog post, I went to a workshop called “Small Talk: It’s a Big Deal!”. In this workshop, we learn how to interact with people for the first time. The workshop is about interacting for the first time, but somehow by coincidence, the people around me were four other people from the Freshmen Seminar. Even though the people there are the people I know, I got to learn new facts about them after this workshop.

In this workshop, we receive tips on how to interact with people for the first time. The presenter shows an example by going around the room and shaking hands with everyone in the room, looking directly in the eye when giving the handshake, a smile naturally when looking directly to the eye, and introduce self when smile naturally. We have also learned about the different kinds of sense of humor, such as how to separate plain sense of humor from potentially offensive sense of humor, but always remember your sense of humor. Before meeting for the first time, practice different ways of starting a conversation and make an extra effort to remember people’s name (we did an activity in which where write down people name if we share a common trait as them), and beware of open and closed body languages. When having a communication, demonstrate that you are listening by restating their comments in another way, ask a person’s name if you’ve forgotten, and show curiosity and sincere interest in finding out about others.

Overall I believe this workshop is very helpful to use not just in conversations, but also in interviews when searching for a job in the future.

The Met experience is fantastic because of the works of arts and cultural difference of different country surprise me every step I take. If the were one word that can describe my tension during the day, it would be a “child.” Everything in the museum seems interesting, and I wanted to visit every exhibit. Every time I walk into a new area, I would drag the person with me and tell them to look at these. The Asian exhibit reminds me of the ancient drama I used to watch when I was little. The European paintings show a comparison between the period where people drew more religious portrait related to religion and the time where people were more sacred and drew pictures of themselves. The armors and weapons area made me extremely excited because I just finished playing a video game that uses these armors and weapons as references. In the Egyptian sections, I expect that there would be mummies in the coffins, but all the coffins were empty.

This experience will assist me during my first semester in Baruch by making me absorb the information I gain every time I walk towards a new art piece. The experience will help me because I studied in a highly-diverse campus. My high school was also a very diverse environment, but the variety of race is not as much because the high school provides a zone program. In College, it’s no longer consist of a neighborhood; it’s consist of the whole world. International students, Transfer students, and students from different states in the U.S. Therefore I believe using the knowledge I gained while touring around the museum could help me to start a conversation or even understand a topic related to the descriptions I saw on the objects.