February 9, 2009
Greetings Prospective Students!!! I know how you are all feeling right now. You’re most likely in that period in which your applications are out of your hands, but you have not heard back regarding your acceptances. You’re excited to see what your future holds, but very anxious at the same time. My best advice to you would be to simply try to enjoy this period, have some fun times with your friends while you’re all still together, and just let things reveal themselves as the time comes. There’s nothing more you can do, so enjoy your last few months in high school while they last. Best of luck to all of you.
The highlight of the week was a speech by Chris Hansen, the host of “To Catch A Predator”, and the following reception. Chris Hansen is basically a pioneer in investigation journalism. “To Catch a Predator” is about catching online sexual predators who prey on underage teenagers, which is a rather weird concept for a show (and even stranger to admit watching), but it’s quite interesting and entertaining. One of the staff members here at UR who lives in one of the residence halls used to watch the show with his residents every week. He decided to see if we could get Chris Hansen to come to campus to do a talk to UR students, and here he is. The speech was fantastic and it was really fascinating. He did a Q&A session with the audience and also discussed ethical boundaries in journalism, the determination of innocence and guilt, and many other pressing issues. Afterwards, there was a reception and I decided to attend. As always, I had my camera and I happened to get a chance to talk to him and get a picture with him. You have no idea how excited my friends and I were.
 
Chris Hansen speaking on-campus
Meeting Chris Hansen of “To Catch A Predator”
A clip from “To Catch a Predator”
As far as what else is going on in my life, I can tell you that I’ve been very busy. My organizations have been sapping a lot of my time and energy. In the midst of last week, I calculated that within a three day stretch, I had twelve hours of meetings. That’s not counting classes or organizational work done on my own, that’s face to face meetings and discussions. I’m on leadership for the Collegiate Disaster Relief Team which plans an Alternative Spring Break to New Orleans. This week, we reviewed applications and issued acceptances. It took tons of time, but it was fun to read all of the amazing things that UR students have done. For example, we had applicants who have tutored inner-city children, traveled to the Philippines to advocate against prostitution and women trafficking, worked for the Bulgarian Red Cross, travled to Guatemala to help build cinder block stoves, served as a volunteer EMT, and did HIV/AIDS research. We have accepted eighteen remarkable students and are now getting down to the final tasks before we go in early March.
My class work didn’t do many any favors in this busy period. I had plenty of work to keep up with amidst all of my other projects. I just finished a 12-page paper on the rhetorical precept of logos and also had an exam in both Business Statistics and Managerial Accounting. Despite less than ideal amounts of studying, I feel as though I ended up with good grades on both.
Enough with work, time to get onto some really good news in my life. I finally received the news that the classes that I want to take abroad this summer will count for the classes I need and give me the credits I wanted!!! With that good news, I applied to Saint Louis University - Madrid for their one-month summer program. I’m really excited. I plan to take a Finance class as well as a Law class called Legal Environment of Business. I wasn’t sure this would work out for a while, but it appears that it will. After the summer program, I am planning to backpack western Europe on my own for forty days and visit roughly ten European countries.
Other fantastic news is the weather. Yesterday, it was sunny with a high of 75 degrees!!! That’s Fahrenheit. I’ve been waiting for this weather ever since I got back to campus. It was so nice that my friends and I couldn’t take it anymore. We went outside to the sand volleyball courts and played over an hour of sand volleyball. It was amazing.
Finally, I had a lot of fun with a Modlin performance. The performance was the 5 Browns. They are five 20-something siblings from Utah who were accepted to Juilliard and are also all piano virtuosos. Their story is quite remarkable. It was an entertaining show to see them all perform together. Here’s a clip of them performing and their story:
The 5 Browns Performing
The 5 Browns
Quote of the Week: Spring is nature’s way of saying “Let’s party!” - Robin Williams
Thought to Ponder: Did you know that a giraffe and rat can go longer without water than a camel can?
YouTube Video of the Week:
I want one
