Last Saturday, I visited The Metropolitan Museum of Art with my friends. It was a five-hour visit. I can barely use fascinating words to describe how awesome it was. As the largest art museum in the United States, its collections are organized by seventeen departments. They are from different origins. I was dazzled by all different kinds of artworks and didn’t know where to explore first. Therefore, I randomly pointed somewhere on the map and went straight toward that collection. It was the European Paintings collection. I had visited series of Vincent van Gogh’s oil paintings. The most impressive one that I had ever seen was the self-portrait of van Gogh. It is a self-portrait with a yellow straw hat. At first, I didn’t notice that the painting is one of his self-portraits. I only saw the crowd standing in front of one artwork. The unusual circumstance had grabbed my attention. I involuntarily moved my steps toward them. Then I realized everything made sense. And I knew that Van Gogh always depicted his face as it appeared in the mirror to produce his portraits. Then I went to the Asian Art collection. I was surprised by the Astor Chinese Garden Court because I can barely see this kind of architecture in my country, maybe in Beijing but not my hometown. It usually appears in the Chinese costume drama or movie and serves as the garden for wealthy people. I almost went through every collection of the museum since my friends needed to complete their assignments for art class by finding the artworks and taking notes on them. I had been here for the second time. Every visit is a different experience, maybe that’s its magic. 

Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest museums in the world with the largest number of visitors. It located next to the Central Park. I went to Metropolitan Museum of Art with my friends. The museum has three million pieces of the art collection, which includes the artworks in different periods such as the art of classical, ancient Egyptian art, European paintings from Thirteenth Century to the modern and contemporary, American artworks and so on.

We arrived at the museum at around 12 O’clock. There were not many people at that time. In the middle of the lobby is a large information desk. After we entered, the first thing that we did was to take the tourist map. The location and passages of each hall are clearly marked on the map. After we had taken the map, then made sure of the visiting route. We prepared a few minutes of planning to determine Chinese Art, European Paintings, and American Art exhibition halls were our main line. We visited a lot of artworks, but I’d like to point out that the 217 Exhibition Hall in the Asian Art was called Astor Court. When I walked in, it gave me the impression that was the ancient Chinese architectural style. From the doorway, it gave the impression of Suzhou Gardens. It was modeled on the Suzhou Nets Garden Palace to build a courtyard of China Ming Dynasty. Then, I searched online on the construction of the courtyard. Patron Astor spent his childhood in China, so the Astor foundation built the courtyard as a gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The courtyard was officially opened in 1981, and the building was completed by twenty-six landscape builders from China. The courtyard of the palace called “Mingxuan” displayed furniture of China Ming Dynasty. Visiting museums is a way to nurture and observe the nature and society. By watching the artworks, we could know history, humanity, scientific knowledge of different periods.

Over the weekend, I visited Queens Museum. Although I live in Queens, I didn’t know there is an art museum in Queens. It is not a big museum, so, not so many people were there. Although it is not a very big museum, I can find many things there, for example, paintings, exhibits. Also, it has a really good view. When I was standing in front of the windows on the second floor of the museum, I enjoyed the beautiful view of the park located in front of the museum.
Inside the museum, I saw some huge paintings on the wall near the entrance. There was a photo that really drew my attention; it was a girl dancing in front of a drawing. The most interesting part of the painting was the girl and the other girl n the drawing were dancing in the same way; the girl was imitating the girl in the drawing. Another thing that made me feel amazing was The Relief Map of New York city’s watershed. It was so big and detailed. It illustrated how the water is being transferred every day. Every day, over a billion gallons of water is delivered to eight million residents through the system. I didn’t know the water is being transferred in this way. Also, there were some documentaries about the city. It was a good experience to understand how the city is working every day.

For my second blog post, I went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It is located right next to Prospect Park. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden has many plants from all over the world in an attempt to preserve and conserve wildlife. The garden contained many trees and plants such as cherry trees and roses. According to the signs, the cherry trees were a gift from the Japanese after World War 1. There were tons of people and bugs in the garden. Walking in the garden, I felt like I was no longer in New York City and that I entered a rural town or uninhabited place. I was surrounded by all sorts of colors and could smell all sorts of plants near me. There were plants such as the Autumn Crocus that were blooming as well as pumpkins since it is Halloween season. There were also many birds chirping and eating the plants and seeds. In the Botanic Garden there was also a library and a herbarium. The library contained at least a thousand books all on plants and trees while the herbarium probably had even more than a thousand.

Last week, I got the chance to go uptown and visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ve visited the museum a couple of times, but I wanted to see one exhibit in particular this time. I went up and got to the exhibit, “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” I found it interesting because it showed the various changes in fashion throughout society. Especially when compared to clothing and fashion choices today, everything has become very different. There was one piece that was just a plain, white t-shirt. It was so simple, but still a staple in many people’s closets today. Everyone owns a white shirt, jeans, and for women, even maybe a black dress. Some pieces of clothing are timeless and this exhibit showed that clearly. However, compared to today, fashion has become both simple and complex. Now, everyone has different opinions in their fashion choices and freedom to wear what they want. While we still wear these white shirts and jeans, we also incorporated different ideas to make them modern. But, at the same time people still like to keep it simple and classic. Even today, I have at least one white t-shirt because it goes with pretty much anything. This visit to MoMA helped me remember how much people have changed and stayed the same at times, like fashion.

This was my second time visiting the Whitney Museum of American Art. My first time visiting was in January and it was an amazing experience. So I was very excited this time to see the new exhibitions.  One of the main reason why I chose the Whitney Museum was because I really enjoy photography, and there were so many aesthetically pleasing paintings and exhibitions in the Whitney museum for me to take pictures of. The very first exhibition that caught my eye was the 95 Horatio Street by a South Korean artist named Do Ho Suh. It was right outside of the Whitney Museum. It was a very interesting piece of artwork because it connected the High Line to the Whitney Museum. There were so many beautiful artworks inside but the one of them really caught my attention. It was just a drawing of a dollar sign, but the quotes around them were really powerful. “All the materialism that now distracts us from salvation will later be consecrated to salvation. When it has lost its power, it will become a symbol of worship.” Initially, I didn’t notice the words around the drawing and I thought it was just another piece of abstract art. However, as I move closer towards the drawing, I noticed the quotes and realized they defined the meaning of the drawing. It was a wonderful visit and I can’t wait to go again when there are new exhibitions!

Because we couldn’t be present at the in-class Writing Center workshop that Professor Petersen brought to our Anthropology class, Korrie and I decided that together, we would go to the writing center. The writing center, on the eighth floor of the campus, offers many sorts of services that would allow us to work on our writing skills. In all honesty, I kind of never thought I would go to the writing center at all. In general, English is the one subject I’m good at, snd I teach English at my old high school, so I thought – wrongly – that there wasn’t really that much for me to learn in terms of writing. However, at the writing center, I learned that there’s always more for me to learn, especially in English; I might have the foundation for writing, but there’s so many things, in terms of style and details that I never even thought about, since all I’ve learned came from a two different teachers. Learning from others, with other perspectives, styles, and skills gave me a depth that I’ve never had before, specifically in the  take-home midterms due in the upcoming weeks. 

Almost everyone at Baruch College knows about the Writing Center. The Writing Center started out as a part of the SACC Tutoring Center, but branched out into its own place. It is a place where students can go when they are having trouble with their writing assignments, need writing advice, or even just for a simple proofread. It’s always great to have another set of eyes read your writing because they can identify issues or grammatical mistakes that you never noticed. It can also help revise your writing, giving you multiple new ideas in order to make your writing sound better. The Writing Center can show you different techniques of writing that you never discovered or thought about using. As you can see in the picture below, me and my friend, Zahava, went to the Writing Center together. It is on the 8th floor. We were curious to see what it was all about, since many of our professors had been talking about the Writing Center. Someone at the Writing Center read over my anthropology paper and gave me advice on how to make it better. I was very glad and relieved to have another set of eyes read my paper. Our anthropology professor, Professor Petersen, even invited a representative from the Writing Center to speak with us. However, I’m pretty sure it was today’s class, and unfortunately I had to miss all of my classes today. At least I had a chance to visit and use the Writing Center to my advantage!

I know this is an hour late but I’ll do it anyway. I went to the Baruch Acturial Science Society meeting where they had a recruiter and past actuary tell us about recruiting, specifically at the ASNY event on Sunday. They served subway sandwitches and had sodas. The guy spoke about resumes and acturial resumes. He spoke about skills that we should aquire such as microsoft excel, pivot tables and SQL. He included tips to recruiting such as taking a lap around the room to acan the area, having multiple copies of your resume, making the first impressions seem like a casual conversation and show your enthusiasm for the profression such as mentioning upcomming exams you will be taking and studying for. He stressed the importance of exams more so than your overall gpa. Exams are the most important factor in recruiting for jobs and internships and you such generally graduate with two or three passed exams. He suggested passing as many exams as possible while you are still in school to lighten the load for the future so that you are not stuck with the same lifestyle for months.